Hercules Seghers
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Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (ca. 1589- ca. 1638) was a Dutch painter and printmaker of the Dutch Golden Age.
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[edit] Prints
He is mainly known for his highly innovative etchings, mostly of landscapes, which were often printed on coloured paper or cloth, and with coloured ink, and hand-coloured and often hand-cropped to different sizes. He also made use of drypoint and a form of aquatint as well as other effects, such as running coarse cloth through the press with the print, for a mottled effect.
Altogether only 183 known impressions survive from all his fifty-four plates and most are now in museums; the Rijksmuseum print room has easily the best collection. Rembrandt collected both paintings (he had eight) and prints by Seghers, and acquired one his his original plates, Tobias and the Angel (HB 1), which he reworked into his own Flight into Eygpt (B 56), keeping much of the landscape. Rembrandt also reworked the Seghers painting Mountain Landscape, now in the Uffizi, and his landscape style shows some influence from Seghers.
Although the dating of his prints remains unclear, his Town with four towers (HB 29) is believed both to be one of the later prints and, by comparison with paintings, to date from around 1631. Given the small number of surviving impressions, it is unlikely that prints were a major source of income for him. His Pile of books (see Rijksmuseum link) is a unusual still-life subject for a 17th century print.
He seems to have invented the "sugar-bite" aquatint technique, which was rediscovered in England over a century later by Alexander Cozens (it is also called lift-ground etching).
[edit] Life
He was born in Haarlem, the son of a cloth merchant, originally from Flanders, who moved to Amsterdam in 1596. There Hercules was apprenticed to the lanscape artist Gillis van Coninxloo, but his apprenticeship was presumably cut short by Coninxloo's death in 1606. Seghers and his father bought a number of his works at the auction of the studio contents. Seghers' father died in 1612, after which he returned to Haarlem, joining the artists guild. He returned to Amsterdam in 1614 to obtain custody of an illegitimate daughter, and the following year married Annekin van der Bruggen, who was sixteen years older than him. In 1620 he bought a large house on the Lindengracht for about 4,000 guilders, but by the late 1620's he was in debt, and in 1631 had to sell it. In the same year he moved to Utrecht and in 1633 he moved to the Hague. He appears to have died by 1638, when a Cornelia de Witte is mentioned as his widow. In the 1630s he was also an art dealer, probably on quite a large scale.
Seghers died probably in the Hague.
His posthumous reputation was boosted by the Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the High School of Painting) of Samuel van Hoogstraten which presented him rather as a Romantic genius avant la lettre, lonely, poor and misunderstood, based mostly on his etchings.
[edit] Paintings
Apart from his prints he had a good reputation for his paintings of landscapes and still-life subjects; his paintings are also rare, with perhaps only fifteen surviving. The Stadholder, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange bought landscapes in 1632. Many of his painted landscapes are fantastic mountainous compositions, whereas in his prints it is often the technical approach rather than the subject which is exteme.
[edit] External links
- Etchings:
- Town with four towers from Cincinnati (have to click "I accept these terms" at bottom first screen)
- NGA Washington, Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg: Small Version
- Cleveland Enclosed Valley
Paintings:
- The Bredius Museum Mountainous Landscape
- Extensive landscape with armed men Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
[edit] Sources
- George S. Keyes in K.L. Spangeberg (ed), Six Centuries of Master Prints, Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, no.s 75 & 76 ,ISBN 0931537150
