Landscape with Steep Cliffs and a Stream [P 18]

Inscriptions

stamped on verso: at centre, with the mark of the City of Amsterdam (L. 11)

Provenance

...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;¹According to L. 11. by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), since 1885

ObjectNumber: RP-T-H-00-250

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam

Context

Segers’s representations of mountain landscapes, trees, vegetation and buildings seem to be more a matter of imagination, intuition and spontaneity than of painstaking observation and study of nature. Illustrative are two sheets belonging to the group of forty-two works by Segers from the Hinloopen collection in the Rijksmuseum (P 18, the present work and P 19, inv. no. RP-T-H-00-251). They are not printed, but rather painted in oil and may have been part of the working material from Segers’s workshop that entered the seventeenth-century collection of Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708). Explored on the sheets in loose brushstrokes are the motifs that Segers would later work out in three etchings (HB 23-24 and HB 36).²See also H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, HB 15-24 and HB 32-37. Only two such oil sketches by Segers are known. The extent to which they are representative of the way in which he conceived his landscapes and executed his etchings, and possibly his paintings as well, is thus difficult to determine.

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

The artist

Biography

Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)

No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.³This summary is based on J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, pp. 17-36. The artist mentioned his age twice: once in 1614 stating he was a twenty-four-year-old man from Haarlem and once in 1623 were he mentions he is about thirty-four years old.⁴Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB 418, p. 280 (27 December 1614); Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Notary J. Warnaertz, NA 691(III), fol. 43r-v (25 March 1623). His parents, Pieter Segers (c. 1564-1611/12) and Cathelijne Hercules (d. after 1618), both came from Ghent. Hercules was most likely their second son, since he was named after the patronymic of his mother. Whether he had more siblings than his younger brother, Laurens (c. 1592/93-after 1616), is not known.⁵Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB 420, p. 267 (13 August 1616).

Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.⁶In 1607 Peter Segers gave his age as forty-three and his occupations as ‘grocer’ (‘crudenier’); Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Notary F. van Banchem, NA 5075, inv. no. 262, fols. 252v-253 (5 April 1607); I.H. van Eeghen, ’De ouders van Hercules Segers’, Maandblad Amstelodamum 55 (1968), no. 4, pp. 74-75. The denomination of the family is unknown, but mostly likely they were not Mennonites, as often claimed in the literature. Hercules became an apprentice of the painter Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1606/07), a landscape artist from Antwerp, who had a workshop at his house on the Oude Turfmarkt.⁷The inventory of Van Coninxloo mentions a debt of 16 guilders and 9 stuivers owed by Pieter Segers for his son’s training; Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Notary F. van Banchem, NA 262, fols. 68v-88 (11-19 January 1607), esp. fol. 85v. Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.⁸J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, p. 19.

In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.⁹H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, II, p. 1035. In the summer of 1614 Segers was again documented as living in Amsterdam, together with his extramarital daughter, Nelletje Hercules (?-?). At the age of twenty-four, he married the forty-year-old Anna van der Bruggen (c. 1574-?).¹⁰Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB 418, p. 280 (27 December 1614). Apparently, he was doing well financially, able in 1619 to purchase a large new house on the Lindengracht in Amsterdam called De Hertog van Gelre.¹¹Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Archive 5062, inv. no. 39, fol. 382 (14 May 1619). In his etching View through the Window of Segers’s House toward the Noorderkerk (HB 41, inv. no RP-P-H-OB-857), he captured the view from a window in the attic of that house. A decade later, his fortunes changed and he had to sell his house and dismantle his workshop. He moved to Utrecht in 1631.¹²Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Archive 5061, inv. no. 2166, fol. 90 (4 January 1631); the official transfer took place on 25 November 1632; see J.Z. Kannegieter, ‘Het huis van Hercules Segers op de Lindengracht te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 59 (1942), nos. 5/6, p. 155; Het Utrechts Archief, Notary G. van Waey, NA U019a003, vol. 118, fol. 106r-v (15 May 1631). Segers seems to have been active as an art dealer. In May 1631 he sold around 137 paintings to the Amsterdam dealer Jean Antonio Romiti (?-?), including a painting by the young Rembrandt (1606-1669).¹³J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, p. 28. In 1632 he was living in The Hague and was involved in the sale of about 180 paintings. The only other evidence of his stay there are two documents of 1633, one concerning the art deal and the other regarding the rental of a house.¹⁴The Hague, Gemeentearchief, Notary G. van Warmenhuysen, NA 18, fol. 177r-v, (28 January 1633); Ibid., NA 18, fol. 179r-v (13 February 1633); A. Bredius, ‘Iets over Hercules Segers’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis. Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers…, 7 vols., Rotterdam, 1877-90, IV (1882), pp. 314-15. His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.¹⁵J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, p. 29.

Segers addressed himself multiple times as painter, such as on 28 January 1633 when he was mentioned as ‘painter, at present living in The Hague’ (‘schilder, jegenwoordigh wonende alhier in Den Hage’).¹⁶The Hague, Gemeentearchief, Notary G. van Warmenhuysen, NA 18, fol. 177r-v (28 January 1633). However, it is his highly original printed oeuvre to which the artist owes his present day fame. Although he specialized in mountain landscapes, it is doubtful if he ever saw a mountain in real life. His depictions of ancient Italian ruins all derive from prints by other artists, and it is unlikely he travelled to Italy himself.

One painting by Segers suggests that he travelled to the Southern Netherlands. His topographical View of Brussels from the Northeast in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (P 16, inv. no. WRM Dep. 249) is in all probability a reflection of a visit to that city.¹⁷J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, p. 19 (n. 31). His landscapes and city views depicting places in the provinces of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland are also most likely based on personal observations and drawings ‘from life’.

Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) was the only contemporary to write about Segers. In his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkunst (Introduction to the Academy of Painting) of 1678, he described an artist who had great talent but did not receive much recognition during his life. Shortly after his death, however, his prints were most sought after by art lovers who were willing to pay enormous prices for impressions of his prints.¹⁸See the first appendix in ibid., pp. 17-36. However this may be, there are indications that Segers’s work was appreciated during his lifetime and well into the seventeenth century by a small group of art lovers and artists.¹⁹Ibid., p. 17.

The paintings that can be attributed to Segers with certainty are a Woodland Path in a private collection in Norway, four mountain landscapes (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Mauritshuis, The Hague; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), five Dutch panoramic landscapes (two in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, on loan from a private collection; private collection in the Netherlands), four hybrid landscapes (private collection in Brussels; Galerie Hans, Hamburg; Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and a View of Brussels (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne). His etchings are extremely rare. In total fifty-three different etchings have survived in 182 impressions – twenty-two of which are unique. Twenty-four of the known etchings depict mountain landscapes, two Biblical scenes, eight panoramic landscapes, six forest-landscapes and trees, eleven ruins and other buildings, four seascapes and ships, and three extraordinary prints show a rearing horse, a skull and a still life with books.

The chronology of Segers’s oeuvre is hard to determine because none of his works is dated. His development as an artist between 1615 and 1630 has traditionally been described as that of a specialist in mountain landscapes based on the tradition set by Pieter Bruegel (1526/30-1569) and his successors towards a pioneer in Dutch panoramic landscapes. Dendrochronological research on the panels he used, however, suggests that Segers made different types of work throughout his career. He created a new kind of panoramic views with a lowered horizon and impressive skies that anticipated the works of the younger generation of specialists in Dutch landscapes, such as Pieter de Molijn (1595-1661) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656). Simultaneously he created, both in painting and etching, fantastic mountain views and mountain landscapes.

Segers’s graphic experiments with tone and colour are closely related to his work as a painter. The materials he used for his prints, such as pigments, priming and linen, are what one expects to find in a seventeenth-century painter’s workshop rather than in that of a printmaker. Segers’s etchings bear witness to an exceptionally inventive use of printmaking techniques. No printmaker before him had experimented on such a grand scale with the possibilities of copper-plates, etching grounds, etching needles and other graphic tools or with printing and touching-up in colour.

Jaap van der Veen, 2016/Huigen Leeflang, 2020

References
A. Bredius, ‘Iets over Hercules Segers’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis. Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers…, 7 vols., Rotterdam, 1877-90, IV (1882), pp. 314-15; I.H. van Eeghen, ’De ouders van Hercules Segers’, Maandblad Amstelodamum 55 (1968), no. 4, pp. 73-76; J.Z. Kannegieter, ‘Het huis van Hercules Segers op de Lindengracht te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 59 (1942), nos. 5/6, pp. 150-57; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, II, p. 1035; J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roeloefs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, pp. 17-36; H. Leeflang, ‘”For he also printed paintings”: Hercules Segers’s Painterly Prints’, in ibid., pp. 39-73; P. Roeloefs, ‘Hercules Segers, the Painter’, in ibid, pp. 111-38

Entry

In this small mountain landscape, the rock formations, castle, vegetation and brook that Segers subsequently worked out in two different etchings (HB 23-24) are explored in thin oil paint on paper (e.g. HB 23 II d, inv. no. RP-P-1910-2012; HB 24a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-807). It was long believed that the two versions of the Landscape with a Steep Cliff and a Stream were printed from the same plate.²⁰For example, in J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. 14, pl. 26. On the other hand, Haverkamp-Begemann (Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, p. 79 under no. 24) described the impressions in separate entries and stated: 'It is unlikely that this print is from the same plate as no. 23.' However, the differences in format, scale, depiction and technique rule out this possibility. Segers most likely first made the oil sketch and used it as the basis for the larger and coarser present version of the etched Landscape with a Steep Cliff and a Stream (HB 24).²¹Haverkamp-Begemann suggested that both the landscape in oil paint and that of the larger etching (HB 24) derive from the small print (HB 23). However, this is unlikely. Why would the artist make an oil sketch of a composition he had already rendered so successfully in print? And why would he make a coarser and much less successful variant (HB 24) after the exceptionally fine, small version of the Landscape with a Steep Cliff and a Stream (HB 23)? The latter print is also not entirely, or only partially, executed in Segers’s lift-ground technique, as Haverkamp-Begemann assumed, but in line etching, as the trials with the etching needle in the sky reveal. The etching has a more extensive foreground and a bit of landscape with trees on the left, which is not found in the oil sketch, and missing as well in the smaller etching (HB 23).

The larger version of the Landscape with a Steep Cliff and a Stream (HB 24) is not Segers’s most successful print. This cannot be blamed on the foul biting that caused a spotty streak in the sky, but primarily on the somewhat coarse way in which the etching turned out, for instance the structures in the rocks. Great is the contrast with the smaller, much subtler version of the Landscape with a Steep Cliff and a Stream (HB 23). Segers made it in his lift-ground technique, drawing the depiction in ink directly on the plate and then etching it.²²For a reconstruction of this technique, see A. Stijnman, ‘Hercules Segers’s Printmaking Techniques’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, pp. 75-89.

Thanks to this simple, yet unique and effective technique, Segers made prints that can hardly be distinguished from pen drawings, and which display comparable variation and refinement in their linearity. In an inventory of 1775, the impression of the first state in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (HB 23 I b, inv. no. RESERVE CB-49-BOITE ECU(ESTNUM 733)) was compared to a pen drawing. This parallel – which was drawn more often and not infrequently – led to some confusion in descriptions of prints by Segers in old collections.²³In the inventory of the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) that was purchased for Louis XVI (1754-1793) in 1771, the etching is described thus: 'This piece evidences an admirable intelligence, one would think it was done with the pen and ink, which has faded. It has all the spirit of Stefano della Bella and Callot' ('Ce morceau est d’une intelligence admirable on le prendait pour être à la plume dont l’encre auroit pali. Il a tout l’esprit des La Belle et Callot'); citation from E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, p. 78. The four prints by Segers in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg were first mentioned in an inventory in 1811. Their description as anonymous paintings in oil was corrected, and they were subsequently called: 'Drawing in indigo on red paper' (HB 7 II c); 'Drawing in indigo on a red ground' (HB 9 I a) and 'Landscape drawn on dark paper in Chinese ink' (HB 14 II b). The sheets were later transferred to the print collection of the State Hermitage Museum. I should like to thank Roman Grigoryev for this information. Two etchings by Segers (HB 13 I g and HB 13 III t) are still kept among the drawings in the Louvre, Paris (inv. nos. 22774 and 22775); for both, see http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr. Segers worked up the print a second time, drawing in the etching ground the scratchy line patterns that gave his rocks their characteristic structure, but which also diminished the print’s subtlety.

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

Literature

J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, under no. 9; J.P. van der Kellen, 'Amsterdam, Neuerwerbungen des Kupferstichkabinetts des Rijksmuseums', Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1911, p. 60; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, p. 94; J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. T. 2, pl. 64; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, under no. 23 (fig. 5); J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, p. 35, under no. 58; M. Schapelhouman and P. Schatborn, Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Artists Born between 1580 and 1600, 2 vols., coll. cat. Amsterdam 1998, no. 289; H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, no. P 18

Citation

H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Landscape with Steep Cliffs and a Stream [P 18], Amsterdam, c. 1622 - c. 1625', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.60462

(accessed 27 April 2025 22:37:59).