Tobias and the Angel [HB 1a]

One state. Watermark: foolscap with five points; similar to Laurentius, I, no. 508 (The Hague, 1633); completely identical, except for the bell on the front peak.

Loss at lower left corner made up and drawn in with green watercolour.

...; collection Pieter Cornelis, Baron van Leyden (1717-1788), Leiden;¹¹According to L. 240. his daughter, Françoise Johanna Gael-van Leyden (1745-1813), Leiden;²²According to L. 240. 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

ObjectNumber: RP-P-OB-796

Credit line: Transferred from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), 1816

Biblical Subjects

Only two works by Segers have been preserved in which human figures are the focus. Both are biblical scenes, freely copied after prints by other masters. Tobias and the Angel is inspired by an engraving of 1613 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.971) by Hendrick Goudt (c. 1583-1648),³³F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, VIII (1953; Goudt), no. 3 after a painting by Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610).⁴⁴Elsheimer’s original painting is untraced, but its appearance is also known from several painted copies, the closest of which is thought to be the version in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. KMSsp.745); see K. Andrews, Adam Elsheimer: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, London 1977, no. 25. The Lamentation of Christ is derived from a woodcut by Hans Baldung (c. 1484-1545) of a century earlier (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-4077).⁵⁵M. Mende, Hans Baldung Grien, das graphische Werk: Vollständiger Bildkatalog der Einzelholzschnitte, Buchillustrationen und Kupferstichen, Unterschneidheim 1978, no. 40.

The two impressions of Tobias and the Angel, in Amsterdam and in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (HB 1b, inv. no. 2368 LR), bear identical watermarks that can be dated circa 1633.⁶⁶See Appendix 3 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. 331-33. Tobias and the Angel and The Lamentation belong to a small group of prints in which Segers created tone using a new and labour-intensive technique (cf. HB 12, inv. no. RP-P-OB-832; HB 18, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-804; HB 34, RP-P-OB-849; HB 41, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-857; and HB 42, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-858). This fact and the dating of the watermarks on both impressions of Tobias and the Angel indicate that they are late works by Segers, if not his last.

Segers's ambition to etch narrative scenes evidently manifested itself late, or was realized only towards the end of his life. In his landscapes, human figures play only a subsidiary role and, in general, are so small that it is difficult to determine how adept he was at drawing them.⁷⁷In the print in question, a third figure, a tiny man with a stick, can be seen on the left and seems to have been unnoticed until now. The standing man in the large Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg (HB 46) is one of the largest figures in Segers’s landscape prints, together with the two figures he added in brush to HB 12a. Three paintings by him contain larger figures (P 5, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 1303; P 7, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. SK-A-3120; P 10, private collection, Belgium), but they are difficult to judge because of their condition or later restorations. That his two narrative scenes and his only animal depiction (HB 52, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-865) rely strongly on prints by other artists suggests he was not particularly confident with figural subject-matter. The rendering of the figures in Segers’s religious prints closely follows their models, while their execution and technique differ entirely.

In terms of dating, style and technique, the works that served as Segers’s prototypes belong to two completely different realms. The print by Goudt is one of seven engravings he made after paintings by Elsheimer, a German artist whose work had caused a furore in Rome and became known in the North mainly through Goudt’s virtuoso reproductive prints. With their striking light effects and saturated blacks, these engravings are among the most influential prints of the seventeenth century and were also seminal for Rembrandt (1606-1669), and his development as an etcher. Thanks to Goudt’s prints, Elsheimer’s influence was felt by artists of Segers’s generation in Amsterdam and Haarlem, including Jan Pynas (c. 1581/82-1631) and his younger brother Jacob Pynas (1592-1650), and Rembrandt’s teacher Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), as emerges from Lastman's painting Tobias and the Angel of 1613 in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (inv. no. S2006-031).⁸⁸A. Blankert et al., God en de goden. Verhalen uit de bijbelse en klassieke oudheid door Rembrandt en zijn tijdgenoten, exh. cat. Washington, DC (National Gallery of Art)/Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1981, no. 21; and A. Tümpel and P. Schatborn (eds.), Pieter Lastman. De leermeester van Rembrandt/The Man who Taught Rembrandt, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1991, no. 3. In Haarlem, Jan van de Velde II (1593-1641) produced scores of prints resonating with the impact of Goudt’s engravings after Elsheimer, including a Tobias and the Angel of 1617 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1878-A-1749).⁹⁹The great seventeenth-century print collector Michel de Marolles (1600-1681) compiled two albums of Dutch prints with chiaroscuro effects. In one album with nocturnal scenes (LXIII. Nuicts diverses), alongside prints by Hendrick Goudt were prints by Jan van de Velde (1593-1641) and Rembrandt’s assistant Jan Gillsz van Vliet (1600/10-1668). A similar classification was recommended by Florent Le Comte (1655-1712) in an album called Nuits et pièces noires, in which prints by Rembrandt, Goudt, Van Vliet and Jan van de Velde, among others, could be kept; see F. Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez d’architecture, peinture, sculpture, et gravure…, 3 vols., Paris 1699, I, p. 21; S. Slive, ‘Criticism of a Criticism’, College Art Journal 14 (1955), p. 139; W.W. Robinson, 'This Passion for Prints': Collecting and Conoisseurship in Northern Europe during the Seventeenth Century', in C.S. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/St Louis (Art Museum) 1981, pp. XLV-XLVI. Cf. H. Leeflang, "'For he also Printed Paintings": Hercules Segers’s Painterly Prints’, 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. 73 (n. 150). The seventeenth-century Scottish collector John Maitland (1616-1682) also had a penchant for Dutch prints with powerful tonal effects. In addition to Rembrandt’s complete oeuvre mentioned in his catalogue of 1689, he had 'Eight Landskips in Colors by Herc. Segers' (no. 46), 'Ten Black Prints by (Jan) van de Velde' (no. 60) and 'black prints' by Hendrick Goudt after Elsheimer (no. 63); see ‘The Second Part of the Famous Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Most Eminent Masters of Europe…,’ in sale, Catalogus librorum instructissimae bibliothecae doctissimi…, London (Benjamin Walford), 28 October 1689, p. 2. In contrast to Segers, these artists did not literally adopt Elsheimer’s figures, but made variations of them.

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

The Apocryphal Book of Tobit recounts how at the behest of his blind and dying father, Tobias travelled from Nineveh to Media. He was accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, who revealed his true identity only when they arrived home. At this time, Tobias cured his father’s blindness with the gall of a fish he had caught along the way with the help of his guardian angel. The biblical message of humbleness, trust in God and honesty propagated in the story of Tobit made it a popular subject among artists of all denominations.²⁷²⁷J. Held, Rembrandt and the Book of Tobit, Northampton 1964, pp. 20-21. It has been suggested by E. Haverkamp-Begemann (Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, p. 29) that Segers had a special connection with the subject because of his supposed Mennonite background. For the denomination of Segers’s family, cf. 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. 17-37.

For his Tobit and the Angel, Segers used an engraving by Hendrick Goudt (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.971) as a model. Segers’s etching shows Goudt’s original composition in reverse, with Tobias (dragging a large fish) and his companion walking from right to left against a background of a forest landscape with a panoramic distant view. The prints differ in many other respects. Segers used a somewhat larger copper-plate than Goudt, enlarged the figures with respect to the landscape and placed them higher in the foreground and descending at an angle.²⁸²⁸A comparable foreground with a steep mound lit from above is found in the painting View of Brussels from the Northeast in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne (P 16, inv. no. WRM Dep. 249). The middle ground, which features a lake in Goudt’s print, is filled with trees and a path winding into the distance in Segers’s version. The most important deviation from Elsheimer’s composition, however, is the elimination of the woods behind the figures, so that their silhouettes stand out freely against an empty sky. Segers did, however, faithfully borrow some details from Goudt’s print, such as the snail and the lizard in the foreground.

Goudt produced his various grey tones and intense black by cutting a network of delicate crosshatching directly into the plate with a burin, and reserving areas of white,²⁹²⁹Goudt used etched lines in only a single print, the Flight into Egypt, also dated 1613; see F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, VIII (1953; Goudt), no. 3; C.S. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/St Louis (Art Museum) 1981, no. 44. Elsheimer, too, made a number of etchings, including a small version of Tobias and the Angel; see K. Andrews, Adam Elsheimer: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, London 1977, no. 58; J. Jacoby, Die Zeichnungen von Adam Elsheimer: Kritischer Katalog, Frankfurt-am-Main 2008, pp. 79-85 (figs. 63-65). while Segers crosshatched a very fine network in the thin etching ground and thereby achieved an even more subtle structure. He then drew the light areas and highlights in the figures and in the landscape with the fine tip of a pen or brush dipped in stopping-out varnish, which he also used to cover the upper part of the sky. The border of the stopping ground can be discerned in the sky above the trees at left and in the wing of the angel at right. The stopping-out varnish eroded the etching ground; and the mordant bit several lines, a phenomenon found more frequently in Segers’s later prints (e.g. HB 2, inv. no. RP-P-OB-797, and HB 34, inv. no. RP-P-OB-849). After etching the tone, Segers covered the plate with a new etching ground in which he drew the figures and the landscape. The result is more delicate than in any other print Segers executed in the same technique. The refinement in the representation of trees is unparalleled in seventeenth-century printmaking.³⁰³⁰Comparable at best are the trees in the etchings by Herman Swanevelt (1603/04-1655) and those by Jan van Brosterhuyzen (c. 1596-1650). The trees in the latter’s prints evidence a botanical accuracy not usually found in Segers’s works, excluding HB 33; see H. Leeflang, 'Geen dromen of grillen van schilders. De bomen van Johannes Brosterhuysen (1596-1650),’ Kunstschrift 48 (2004), no. 4, pp. 24-29.

The two surviving impressions of this plate are both printed in olive green. The tone of the impression in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (HB 1b, inv. no. 2368 LR), is a shade darker than the one in Amsterdam.³¹³¹The reproduction of the Paris impression in E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, is too brown and gives an erroneous impression of the original. It has been suggested that the latter impression was pulled by Rembrandt, but this would seem to be impossible, given the colour of the ink and the dating of the identical watermark of both impressions (E. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher: The Practice of Production and Distribution, 3 vols., Ouderkerk aan den IJssel 2006, II, p. 135, no. Q’b.: first state dated c. 1653; and M. Schapelhouman in E. Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/London (British Museum) 2000-01, no. 71; R. Fucci, Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions, exh. cat. New York (Columbia University, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery) 2015, p. 39 (n. 52), cf. R. Fucci and J.P. Filedt Kok, 'Review of H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols.', Simiolus 40 (2018), no. 4, p. 319 (n. 15)). The sky in both is covered with plate tone that was partly wiped away around the figures and areas of trees. In the Paris impression, the vertical bands of leftover ink give the impression of a rain shower. For the rest, the impressions are virtually identical and, as such, are exceptional in Segers’s extant work.

At some point Segers’s plate came into the possession of Rembrandt, who rigorously reworked it circa 1652 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-116).³²³²E. Hinterding and J. Rutgers (comp.), The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Rembrandt, 7 vols., Ouderkerk aan den IJssel 2013, II, no. 271. It is not known how and when Rembrandt came to have the plate. Perhaps it was part of Segers’s workshop estate, like many of the experimental or semi-worked up prints by him that have come down to us. For the literature on the plate reworked by Rembrandt, see E. Hinterding, Rembrandt Etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum and Paris 2008, no. 43; C.S. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/St Louis (Art Museum) 1981, no. 164; R. Baumstark et al., Von neuen Sternen: Adam Elsheimers Flucht nach Ägypten, exh. cat. Munich (Pinakothek) 2005, no. 15. Rembrandt scraped away Tobias and the angel and the trees on their left and right. In their place, he added a depiction of Joseph and the Virgin Mary on the Flight into Egypt and some trees in etching and drypoint. The wing, head, sleeve and staff of Segers’s angel can still be discerned in the middle tree. Judging by the number of times Rembrandt represented the story of Tobit, the subject must have been dear to him, but he evidently felt that Segers’s figures were not up to snuff. By replacing them with a much smaller figure group on a donkey, Rembrandt came closer to Elsheimer’s original composition, in which the figures are surrounded by trees rather than rising above them.

Goudt’s Flight into Egypt after Elsheimer (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.972) is similarly built up and Rembrandt may have had this nocturnal scene in mind when he chose the same subject to replace Segers’s interpretation of Elsheimer’s Tobias.³³³³F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, VIII (1953; Goudt), no. 3; C.S. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/St Louis (Art Museum) 1981, no. 44. See N. Orenstein, ‘Segers and Rembrandt: Experiment and Influence’, 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. 99-109. Subtler, yet equally telling are Rembrandt’s interventions in the landscape. He largely eliminated the trees behind the figures (even though traces of some of them, such as the cypress-like one to the left of Tobias, are still visible) and replaced them with sketchier types of trees. By reinforcing the passages of shade in the foreground and in the wooded landscape at left, Rembrandt heightened the contrast and the volume of the areas of trees. Segers’s delicate structures were sacrificed to create a more readable and varied woodland landscape. Rembrandt’s alterations were primarily aimed at defining elements in the landscape more clearly. For instance, he enlarged the river in the background by polishing out trees and enhancing the banks with drypoint. He also reinforced the mountains in the background. Surprisingly, Rembrandt did not touch the irregularities in Segers’s plate, such as the traces of foul biting in the sky and above the group of trees at the left. He removed only the beginnings of a cloud in the middle of the sky.

Impressions of the plate after Rembrandt’s first reworking are extremely rare: only two are known, both on costly vellum; one in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1848,0911.31), the other in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 2370 LR). Of the third state, after the addition of a few details in drypoint, only a single impression is known, also kept in the Louvre (inv. no. 2371 LR). After Rembrandt’s further reworking of the trees and background in etching, more prints were pulled and disseminated. The etching is not signed.

Revising an etching plate by another artist is unique in Rembrandt’s oeuvre, and rare in the work of other artists. One wonders about the extent to which art lovers and collectors of Rembrandt’s etchings recognized that the print was not entirely by him, but rather a unique curiosity in which stylistic features and techniques of two printmakers come together.³⁴³⁴The first to note the connection between Rembrandt’s Flight into Egypt and Segers’s Tobias and the Angel was W.J.M. Engelberts (1809-1887), an attendant at the Rijksmuseum. His identification was mentioned in the sale catalogue of the J.D. Böhm collection, Vienna (A. Posonyi), 4 December 1865, no. 626. Through the etcher Seymour Haden (1818-1910), this information found its way to Eugène Dutuit (1807-1886), who was the first to publish it; see E. Dutuit, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, 6 vols., Paris and London 1881-88, V (1882; Rembrandt), no. 61 (n. 1); J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 1..

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

E. Dutuit, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, 6 vols., Paris and London 1881-88, V (1882; Rembrandt), no. 61 (incl. n. 1); J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 1a (fig. XXXXV); Dutch Art, 1450-1900: Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Dutch Art, exh. cat. London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1930, no. 808; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 12, 32-33; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 89, 91-93; E. Haverkamp Begemann (ed.), Hercules Seghers, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boymans) 1954, no. 11; J. Held, Adam Elsheimer: Werk, künstlerische Herkunft und Nachfolge, exh. cat. Frankfurt-am-Main (Städelsches Kunstinstitut) 1966-67, no. 295; J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. 1; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 1a, also pp. 29-30, 43-44, 53, 55; F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XVIII-XIX (1969; Rembrandt), no. 56 and XXVI (1981; Segers), no. 1a; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, p. 145, and Appendix 7, no. HB 1a; C. Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. Washington, DC (National Gallery of Art) 1990, no. 40a; P. van der Coelen et al., Patriarchs, Angels and Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1996, no. 48; C. White, Rembrandt as an Etcher: A Study of the Artist at Work, 2nd edn., New Haven and elsewhere 1999, pp. 245-49; E. Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/London (British Museum) 2000, no. 71; C.S. Ackley et al., Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago) 2003-04, nos. 14-15; E. Hinterding, Rembrandt Etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum and Paris 2008, no. 43; E. Hinterding and J. Rutgers (comp.), The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Rembrandt, 7 vols., Ouderkerk aan den IJssel 2013, no. 271 (for the states and impressions of the plate reworked by Rembrandt); 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 1a

H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Tobias and the Angel [HB 1a], Amsterdam, c. 1630 - c. 1633', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37241