Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1618 - c. 1622
line etching, etching trials, spots caused by foul biting in etching ground, printed in black on linen prepared with a bluish-grey, lead-based ground, coloured with transparent, bluish-grey paint and transparent yellow paint; framing line in grey ink on bottom and right side
height c. 96 mm × width c. 175 mm (trimmed outside the printed surface, except at left)
inscribed: upper left, in an eighteenth-century hand, in black ink, abdije te Rijnsburg
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (L. 240)
First state of two (line etching).
Losses at upper left corner and lower right; ground cracked in five places along bottom edge; small puncture hole at upper centre with a loss of ground; the verso is brown from the oil-based binding medium in the ground having permeated the linen.
...; collection Pieter Cornelis, Baron van Leyden (1717-1788), Leiden;1 his daughter, Françoise Johanna Gael-van Leyden (1745-1813), Leiden;2 from whom, en bloc, fl. 100,000, to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1778-1846), King of Holland, Amsterdam, for the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (L. 240), The Hague, 1807; transferred to the museum, 1816
Object number: RP-P-OB-860
Credit line: Transferred from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), 1816
Copyright: Public domain
Castles, Ruins and Other Buildings
The buildings in Segers’s topographical prints and paintings are usually depicted from a great distance and subsumed in the landscape. Architecture, however, did capture his interest, but judging from the buildings encountered in his etchings, they are primarily related to structures from a far-flung past: imaginary or not, they are medieval castles, ancient ruins or old houses.3 Moreover, in seventeenth-century inventories, mention is made of four small painted 'ruins' ('ruïnes') by his hand.4 The structure of stones and dilapidated, overgrown walls, like the weathered rocks in mountain landscapes, appear to be an ideal subject for Segers’s restless etching needle and graphic experiments.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)
No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.5 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.6 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.7
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.8 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.9 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.10
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.11 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-?).12 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.13 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 1631.14 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).15 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.16 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.17
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’).18 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.19 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.20 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.21
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
A relatively large number of impressions has come down to us of Segers’s other early depiction of a medieval building, the ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg. Of the small etching (HB 47), eight impressions are known, including one in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that had not yet been described before 2016 (HB 47 II h, inv. no. WA1863.6643). The abbey of Rijnsburg, northwest of Leiden, was founded in 1133 as a Benedictine convent by Petronella van Lotharingen (c. 1082-1144), widow of Count Floris II (c. 1083-1121).22 The forty nuns and abbesses who lived there until 1574 came from noble Dutch families. The cloister was destroyed by the rebel Protestants during the Siege of Leiden in 1574. Along with the Haarlem ruins of Brederode Castle and the Huis te Kleef, the Abbey of Rijnsburg is one of the most frequently depicted medieval Dutch edifices.23 It features in two etchings by Jan van de Velde (1593-1641) (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1898-A-20364X).24
Like his rendering of Brederode, Segers here, too, chose an alternative vantage-point, namely a view of the north façade and what remained of the nave of the abbey seen from the south. Four impressions have been preserved of the earliest state of the etched plate, without additions in drypoint. They are printed on linen primed with a grey ground and in two instances coloured with a thin layer of transparent paint (the present work, and HB 47 I d, Washington (DC), National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1944.5.132). Four other impressions show the plate in its second state, in which the foreground and the walls of the ruin are provided with tone through fine hatching in drypoint (HB 47 II e-h). Segers seems to have only later discovered the possibilities of drypoint and applied them in his plates. In The Enclosed Valley (HB 13, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-812), for instance, the additions in drypoint look like a logical second step to perfect a delicate etching. In the small Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg, the shadows in drypoint instead resemble an addition made afterwards. The four impressions of the second state are printed on paper, three in blue on a pink ground and coloured with a transparent blue paint. The tone of this paint is comparable to the blue with which the etching is printed, and was applied with rapid, irregular brushstrokes. In all three prints, this is doubtless the beginning of an alteration that was intended to be followed by finishing touches in different colours.
There are indications that Segers worked in sessions. No drypoint is found in his other early etchings, except for the unique Farm Building Surrounded by Trees and a Fence in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden (HB 36, inv. no. A.49377).25 Not coincidentally, it is printed in the same blue on a similarly pink-prepared ground as the three impressions of the Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg. A period of time could have elapsed between the moment when the plates were etched and when they were worked up with drypoint. To make impressions from one or more plates, Segers must have prepared a certain amount of coloured grounds and priming, ink, and paint. Both the Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg and the Farm Building Surrounded by Trees and a Fence were probably worked up with drypoint around the same time and then printed in an identical combination of blue ink and a pink ground. Segers evidently never finished colouring these prints, which accounts for their curiously nonchalant appearance.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J.G.A. Frenzel, ‘Herkules Zegers, Zeitgenosse Paul Potter’s: Maler und Kupferstecher und Erfinder der Kunst, durch Kupferabdrücke mit mehreren Farben Gemälde nachzuahmen‘, Kunst-Blatt. [Beilage zu] Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Stuttgart) 23 [Morgenblatt 10], 1829, no. 11; G.K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon oder Nachrichten von dem Leben und den Werken der Maler, Bildhauer, Kupferstecher, Formschneider, Lithographen, 22 vols., Munich 1832-52, XXII (1852), no. 11; J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 53a (Die kleine Kirchenruine); W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 30-34, 40-67, 83; R. Grosse, Die holländische Landschaftskunst, 1600-1650, 2nd edn., Stuttgart 1925, pp. 99, 100; E. Trautscholdt, ‘Seghers (Segers, Seegers, Zegers), Hercules (Herkules, Harcules) Pietersz.‘, in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXX (1936), p. 447; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 13-14, 16, and 18; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 40-42, 77; J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Hercules Seghers en de topografie‘, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 3 (1955), p. [1]; W. van Leusden, Het grafisch-technisch probleem van de etsen van Hercules Seghers, Utrecht 1960, p. 11; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 47 I a; J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 39; J. Bolten, ‘De uitbeelding van de ruïne van Rijnsburg in de 17de en 18de eeuw‘, Delineavit et Sculpsit 13 (1994), p. 10; J. Bolten et al., ‘De uitbeelding van de ruïne van Rijnsburg in prent en tekening, 1600-1812. Catalogus‘, Delineavit et Sculpsit 13 (1994), no. 10; F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XXVI (1981; Hercules Segers), no. 47 I a; 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. HB 47 I a
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg from the South: Small Version [HB 47 I a], Amsterdam, c. 1618 - c. 1622', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37298
(accessed 23 June 2024 02:41:59).