a private practice: hercules segers and the market for prints
TRANSCRIPT
A PRIVATE PRACTICE: HERCULES SEGERS
AND THE MARKET FOR PRINTS
Approved by:
_________________________________ Professor Lisa Pon
_________________________________ Professor Pamela Patton
_________________________________ Dr. Eric White
A PRIVATE PRACTICE: HERCULES SEGERS
AND THE MARKET FOR PRINTS
A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of
Meadows School of the Arts
Southern Methodist University
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
with a
Major in Art History
by
Jun Nakamura
(B.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis)
May 18, 2013
Copyright 2013
Jun Nakamura
All Rights Reserved
iv
Nakamura, Jun B.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis, 2010
A Private Practice: Hercules Segers and the Market for Prints
Advisor: Professor Lisa Pon
Master of Arts conferred May 18, 2013
Thesis completed April 18, 2013
The history of art is peppered with artists who seem out of time and out of place –
artists whose works demand explanation, but offer none. Hercules Segers is one such
artist. A Dutch landscape etcher working in the first half of the seventeenth century,
Segers’s life and work have long puzzled historians, and his prints are particularly
peculiar. Segers employed unique etching techniques – some his own invention – which
he used to create haunting landscapes that led some art historians to question his sanity.
The prints, of which few survive, are also unique in another sense. No two prints are
alike; Segers customized each print by printing them in different colors, on different
supports, preparing, dying, overpainting, and cropping them in a multitude of ways.
However, what is perhaps most intriguing about the work of Segers is the unresolved
nature of so many of his prints.
Scholarship has heretofore examined the technical aspects of Segers’s production,
and some scholars have ventured to extrapolate a psychobiography from the prints. There
has, however, been a dearth in the scholarship on the reception of Segers’s prints, their
intended purpose, and how they might have fit into the Haarlem and Amsterdam print
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markets. This thesis aims to address some of these issues by arguing that Segers in fact
had no intended audience, but was rather printing for his own sake, and that his prints
were not distributed until after his death sometime in the mid 1630s. The highly
experimental nature of his prints, their extreme rarity (many survive in unique
impressions), and his messy workshop practice – evidenced by dirt and markings found
on the prints – indicate a man not intending for his prints to be sold on the market.
Moreover, the lack of any contemporary reaction to his work – or any contemporary
reference to his prints at all – and the known provenance of his printed oeuvre also
support the conclusion that his prints were not known or circulated during his lifetime.
By comparing Segers with other landscape etchers and publishers working within his
milieu, this paper argues that Segers’s print production was – uniquely – a private
practice.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x
Chapter
INTRODUCTION 1
1. SEGERS - MAN AND MYTH 5
2. A HISTORIOGRAPHY 16
3. THE PRINTS - RECONSTRUCTING A PRIVATE PRACTICE 28
4. SEGERS’S CONTEMPORARIES AND THE AMSTERDAM 49 AND HAARLEM PRINT MARKETS
5. REMBRANDT AND SEGERS 67
CONCLUSION 85
FIGURES 93
WORKS CITED 128
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 137
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul, 2012 93
2. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It (HB 12b), 94 c.1611-1635
3. Meindert Hobbema, The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689 95
4. Hercules Segers, Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road: Version I 96 (HB 17IIb), c.1611-1635
5. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall: Version I (HB 21IIId), 97 c.1611-1635
6. Hendrik Goudt after Adam Elsheimer, Tobias and the Angel, 1613 98
7. Hercules Segers, Tobias and the Angel (HB 1a), c.1611-1635 99
8. Willem van Nieulandt, View of the Therms of Diocletian, c. 1602-1610 100
9. Hercules Segers, Roman Ruins (HB 43a), c.1611-1635 101
10. Hercules Segers, composite of four impressions of River Valley with a 102 Waterfall: Version I (HB 21), c.1611-1635
11. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall: Version II (HB 22IIe), 103 c.1611-1635
12. Hercules Segers, River Valley with Four Trees (HB 4Ib), c.1611-1635 104
13. Hercules Segers, Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6Ib), 104 c.1611-1635
14. Hercules Segers, The Large Tree (HB 34a), c.1611-1635 105
15. Hercules Segers, detail of The Large Tree (HB 34a), c.1611-1635 105
16. Hercules Segers, detail of Plateau in Rock Mountains (HB 10Ia), 106 c.1611-1635
17. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery (HB 44a), c.1611-1635 106
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18. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery (HB 44b), c.1611-1635 107
19. Claes Jansz Visscher, Pleasant Places, Vierbake t’Sandtvoordt 107 (Contents), 1612
20. Jan van de Velde, Eighteen Landscapes and Ruins (Title Sheet), 1615 108
21. Hercules Segers, detail of Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6IId), 108 c.1611-1635
22. Hercules Segers, detail of Valley with Towns, Churches and Other 109 Buildings (HB 29h), c.1611-1635
23. Hercules Segers, detail of Valley with Towns, Churches and Other 109 Buildings (HB 29h) verso, c.1611-1635
24. Hercules Segers, detail of Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road: Version 110 I (HB 17IIb) verso, c.1611-1635
25. Hercules Segers, detail of Mountain Valley with Broken Pine Trees 111 (HB 3) verso, c.1611-1635
26. Claes Jansz Visscher, Pleasant Places, Onder Wegen Heemstee, 1612 111
27. Hercules Segers, Winding River in a Valley (HB 14Ia), c.1611-1635 112
28. Hercules Segers, Valley with Towns, Churches and Other Buildings 113 (HB 29c), c.1611-1635
29. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Large Landscapes, 1553-1556 114
30. Hercules Segers, Country Road with Trees and Buildings (HB 37), 115 c.1611-1635
31. Gillis van Coninxloo, Forest Landscape, 1600 116
32. Willem Buytewech, Various Small Landscapes, 1621 116
33. Hercules Segers, View of Amersfoort (HB 30), c.1611-1635 117
34. Hendrik Goltzius, Dune Landscape near Haarlem, 1603 117
35. Jan van de Velde, Eight Landscapes (Landscape with Haarlem in the 117 Distance), c.1614-1618
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36. Willem Buytewech, Various Small Landscapes, Chapel at Eyckenduyn, 118 1621
37. Esaias van de Velde, Path Leading to a Farm, c.1610 -1620 118
38. Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Oaks, 1632. 119
39. Hercules Segers, Old Oak Tree and Distant View (HB 28a), c.1611-1635 119
40. Hercules Segers, detail of Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It 120 (HB 12a), c.1611-1635
41. Hercules Segers, detail of Country Road with Trees and Buildings 120 (HB 37), c.1611-1635
42. Hercules Segers, Skull (HB 53), c.1611-1635 121
43. Hercules Segers, The Two Trees (HB 33), c.1611-1635 122
44. Rembrandt van Rijn, Three Heads of Women, One Lightly Etched, c. 1637 123
45. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1653 124
46. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses (third state), 1653 125
47. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses (fourth state), 1653 126
48. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It (HB 12a), 127 c.1611-1635
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to first thank the vigilant Prof. Lisa Pon for making sure that I “kept
writing” at every step along the way, and for always pushing me in directions I had not
thought to take; I know that I am a better scholar for it. I would also like to thank the
husband and wife dream-team that is Prof. Pamela Patton and Dr. Eric White. Prof.
Patton’s confidence in me offered encouragement when most needed and I thank Dr.
White for his suggestion of Hercules Segers as a thesis topic. I also thank Profs. Amy
Buono, Eric Stryker, and Randall Griffin for advice they offered while I was writing.
However, I owe my gratitude to all of my professors for their constant guidance and
encouragement. I thank Adrianna Stephenson for reading drafts, offering comments, and
sitting through to trial-run presentations, and Joy Richardson for being Joy; we miss you!
I would also like to thank the Meadows School of the Arts and the Department of Art
History for their generosity in awarding me a Cullum Travel Grant, without which my
thesis would not have been possible.
Outside of the department I am indebted to Dr. Ad Stijnman, who took me under
his wing at the Rijksprentenkabinet, and who has since continued to generously aid in my
studies. At the Rijksmuseum, I would like to thank Marja Stijkel and Erik Hinterding for
accommodating my visit, and at the British Museum I thank An van Camp for the same. I
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owe enormous thanks to Prof. Paul Crenshaw with whom I have consulted regarding my
thesis on a number of occasions, and without whom I would not be an art historian.
Shout-outs are also in order for Prof. Alicia Walker, Tom Reed, John Witty, and
countless others who have helped me along the way.
Lastly, I thank my classmates for making the past two years so much fun. I am so
glad to have come into a program with such a great group of people. I also thank
Madeleine (and Pancake) Burkart for putting up with late nights and busy schedules for
two years. And of course, I thank Mom, Dad, and the rest of my family for all of their
support; I am sorry I spent that one Thanksgiving surrounded by piles of books in the
living room.
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INTRODUCTION
In early 2012, Werner Herzog created an installation at the Whitney Biennial that
incorporated – or rather consisted of – large wall projections of the work of Dutch
landscape etcher Hercules Segers (1589/90-c.1636/8).1 When interviewed about the
project (Fig. 1), he responded:
It’s on a Dutch painter, who nobody knows: Hercules Segers, 1620s. Not even curators of museums know, nor you for example, who should know because you are into art, into images, into things. He in my opinion is the forerunner of all modernity. It’s strange because he is still unknown, and he is one of the greatest ever in visual arts. A visionary, four hundred years ahead of [his] time.2
Herzog’s praise is warranted, albeit a bit over the top.3 Hercules Segers was in many
ways ahead of his time. He invented the lift-ground process of etching (also called sugar-
lift), but there is no indication that he showed it to any other etchers, and so it died with
him; it was not developed again until the mid-eighteenth century.4 Segers also
1 In some late 19th and early 20th century scholarship, his name is spelled Seghers. However, during his lifetime, the spelling with the ‘h’ appears only once. Segers never spelled his own name with the extraneous ‘h’. For a full explication of the matter, see Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Karel G. Boon, Hercules Segers, The Complete Etchings, (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema; The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 17. (Hereafter referred to as ‘HB, Hercules Segers’) 2 “MOTHERBOARD MEETS WERNER HERZOG (trailer),” YouTube video, 0:55, posted by MotherboardTV, Nov. 30, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayJPnh0P6fI&feature=player_embedded. 3 Curators of museums do know the work of Segers, as do many art historians. His affinity with Rembrandt – which will be discussed at length later in the present study – has led many art historians to an at least cursory familiarity with him. Segers, though perhaps under-studied, is by no means unheard of. 4 John Rowlands, Hercules Segers, (New York: G. Braziller, 1979), 20.
2
implemented a mode of etching much like aquatint, but utilizing intricate hatching rather
than a porous resin.5 This technique too was lost after his death, and to my knowledge has
not been employed since.6 However, the question of whether or not we, as people who
are “into art, into images, into things,” should know the name of Hercules Segers is a
difficult one. It is difficult because Segers’s life and work – like one of his mountainous
landscapes – are obscured, clouded over with ambiguity and myth. This is partly due to a
lack of documentary evidence related to his life, and a lack of contemporary commentary.
Moreover, his oeuvre – both printed and painted – is relatively small. There are no more
than fifty-four surviving etchings, known from a total of 183 impressions, meaning that a
disproportionately large number of his prints survive as unique impressions.7 Of his
paintings, just under a dozen are generally accepted as works of Segers, though there are
more attributed works.8 Further contributing to his obscurity (internationally, at least) is
the fact that only seven of his prints are in collections outside of Europe – one in
Chicago, one in New York, three in Ohio, and two at the National Gallery in D.C. – and
nearly all of his paintings remain in Northern Europe.
5 Haverkamp-Begemann provides a fairly good description of these processes in detail, although some of the specifics seem to be slightly inaccurate. HB, Hercules Segers, 42-46; Others have conducted similar analyses of Segers’s etching methods including Van Leusden. Willem van Leusden, The Etchings of Hercules Seghers and the Problem of his Graphic Technique, (Utrecht: A.W. Bruna, 1961). 6 With the exception of people (like Willem Van Leusden) who were trying to recreate Segers’s techniques. 7 Twenty-two prints, to be exact, are unique impressions. By coincedence, HB 13 survives in twenty-two impressions, the most of any of his prints. For a breakdown of the number of impressions of each subject preserved, see the table in footnote 108 of HB, Hercules Segers, 49. 8 These figures are drawn from HB, Hercules Segers, and the Rijksmuseum’s website. Figures vary on the number of paintings attributable to Segers. The Rijksmuseum’s website says eleven. Other sources say twelve, or about a dozen. Collins attributes many more, and adds etchings as well, but his attributions are generally rejected. See Seymour Slive, “Hercules Seghers by Leo C. Collins,” review of Hercules Seghers, by Leo C. Collins, College Art Journal 14 No. 3 (Spring, 1955): 304-306. See also, Leo C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
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Despite the rarity of his prints, scholarship has been conflicted about the volume
of Segers’s production and few have addressed the question of his intended audience.
Beginning with Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), who claimed that “printers took
his prints by the basket to the merchants of butter and soap for them to wrap their wares,”
there has been confusion surrounding the amount, dissemination, and reception of his
prints.9 Most of the scholarship, however, has tended towards the belief that Segers was
printing small editions with limited circulation. As An Van Camp notes in the catalogue
to a show at the British Museum in early 2012, “Nothing is known about the distribution
of Segers’ prints. The small number of surviving impressions and the fact that only a
handful of collectors seemed to have acquired them, suggests that they were not widely
distributed.”10 Haverkamp-Begemann likewise notes limited distribution, and
consolidation in a few collections early on.11 However, scholarship on Segers has not
gone far enough in saying that distribution was limited. This paper will argue that within
his lifetime Segers did not sell his prints, nor did he have any intention to do so. By all
indications, Segers was not printing his plates in the manner of a man intending to sell
them. Extraneous markings, dirt, debris, and other idiosyncrasies indicate messiness in all
stages of printing. The haphazard production is not limited to the way he etched his
plates, which previous scholarship has addressed to some degree, but rather it extends to
the way he printed, and the way he treated his prints after they were printed.
The present study on Segers’s printing practices and their impact (or lack thereof)
on contemporary markets is broken down into five chapters, along with an introduction 9 HB, Hercules Segers, 24. 10 An Van Camp, Hercules Segers and his ‘printed paintings’, (London: British Museum, 2012), 4. http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/herculessegers_painted-prints-introduction.pdf 11 HB, Hercules Segers, 23.
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and a conclusion. The first chapter will address biographical concerns by outlining the
circumstances of his life and doubts concerning biographical details. In establishing what
is or is not known about Segers’s life it will be possible to establish how Segers’s work
fits within his life. The second chapter will outline a historiography and address some of
the problems and concerns of Segers literature. Namely, it will look at past approaches to
Segers’s work and identify problems in said approaches. Chapter three looks at Segers’s
prints as physical objects, and aims to extrapolate something of his working practice by
looking at things such as marks left on his prints. In the fourth chapter, Segers is placed
in the context of his contemporaries: other artists, etchers, and printers working in
Haarlem and Amsterdam during the first few decades of the seventeenth century. In this
way, it will be established how Segers was working apart from or as a part of the
Haarlem print circle. The fifth and final chapter will contrast some of the aspects of
Segers’s life and practice to that of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), a figure to whom
he is often compared. The two artists, though alike in many ways, are a useful
comparison precisely because their goals were so different in spite of apparent
similarities in art practice. Lastly, the conclusion – apart from the usual functions – will
also answer some of the questions left unaddressed in the rest of the paper.
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Chapter 1
SEGERS - MAN AND MYTH
Pursuant to the goals of this paper, we open with a print. Segers’s HB 12b, called
the Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It (Fig. 2), has been given a pedestrian enough
title; but from such a title, one would never know how remarkably unique this print is.12
In “Inroads to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting,” Julie Berger
Hochstrasser argues that the roads of Dutch landscapes create a point of access through
which a viewer may enter. Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (Fig. 3,
1689) is perhaps the quintessential example, but in countless Dutch paintings the viewer
looks into the picture and finds him or herself on a wooded path. A distant figure or two
often give scale to the setting, and give all the more reason to engage. For Hochstrasser,
the road “draws the eye inward… where we can 'go' with our eyes, we can also follow
with our bodies.”13 Segers’s road offers us no such entrance. Instead, we are confronted
with a smattering of texture and lines – craggy and volcanic, with undulating ridges that
resemble the folds of the brain. The print calls attention to its own surface, and one
cannot help but look closer and to examine the print as an agglomeration of details. Only 12 Throughout this paper, Segers’s prints will be referred to by their catalogue number from Haverkamp-Begemann’s monograph. 13 Julie Berger Hochstrasser, “Inroads to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997): 196.
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after a pause spent carefully searching the surface does one find the road referenced in
the title, at the bottom right of the composition. Even here the road goes only so far
before it drops off, either dipping behind a hill or stopping at a precipice. After long
consideration, one finds other details: a small cottage here, a tree there. And once the
rough-hewn landscape has been exhausted, we look to the background. Here, the
representational mode of the rest of the print is abandoned. Immediately above the
horizon, a margin of hatched scratches act as a buffer between the realm of representation
at the bottom, and the realm of abstraction above. In the sky Segers placed an amorphous
splotch, whose width reaches across nearly half the plate. Inside the mass, coral-like
forms emerge alongside grids in negative. Through all of these maddening idiosyncrasies,
one finds themselves asking who created this print, and for what reason?
HB 12b is not the most typical Segers print, but it is also not atypical of his work.
Many of his prints include the stray marks, the messiness, or the all-over textural qualities
noted above. His printed oeuvre is also remarkably diverse, and is thus not only hard to
contextualize vis-à-vis his contemporaries, but also to group it together as a single body
of work. Though almost all landscapes – Segers’s prints range from intimate forest scenes
to vast mountain expanses, from flat countrysides to rough volcanic gorges, and
occasionally a still life or history scene. Segers’s two still life scenes are all the more
exceptional because they are the first ever etched still lifes.14 Segers also draws upon a
wide range of techniques as well as an arsenal of representational approaches. Some of
his prints are tonal, others are linear, and still others fall somewhere between. But before 14 Christopher P. Heuer, “Entropic Segers,” in Art History 35, no. 5 (2012): 953. One – a pile of books – survives in only two impressions, both heavily overpainted. The second is a skull, which it almost seems strange to call still life for it lacks any context. Does it sit on a table? Against a wall? There is not even a shadow.
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we delve into the details of Segers’s print production, we must first begin with the basics:
the
All of the known facts about Hercules Segers’s life can be recounted in a few
pages. A timeline noting every known document related to his life appears in Egbert
Haverkamp-Begemann’s monograph of 1973, taking up only three pages including
footnotes and descriptions. Though four decades old at this point, Haverkamp-
Begemann’s monograph is still the standard for Segers scholars, and has the most
complete and in-depth analysis of nearly every impression of Segers’s etchings to date.
As an introduction to the artist, the short biography offered by Samuel van Hoogstraten in
his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (Introduction to the High School of
Painting) of 1678 is both entertaining and useful, though highly anecdotal. As the only
seventeenth-century commentary on his life, and the genesis of all subsequent work on
Segers, it is worth reproducing here:
Here it is appropriate to refer to the example of Herkules Zegers, who did not receive recognition in spite of his greatness of art: he flourished, or rather withered, in my early years. He was a keen and steady observer, mastered the design of landscapes and backgrounds, entertained with inventive mountains and caves, and was pregnant with whole provinces, to which he gave birth as immeasurable spaces, and which he showed wonderfully in his paintings and prints. He exercised his art with incomparable zeal: but what happened? Nobody wanted to look at his works during his lifetime: the printers took his prints by the basket to the merchants of butter and soap for them to wrap their wares and most of them ended up as paper bags. Finally he showed a plate as his masterpiece to an art dealer in Amsterdam and offered it for cheap; but imagine, the dealer complained that there was no market for his prints, and hardly thought it worthwhile to pay the cost of the copperplate. Thus, poor Herkules returned home disconsolate, and after having printed a few copies from this plate he cut it into pieces, saying that the time would come that collectors would pay for one copy four times as much as he had asked for the whole plate. This actually did happen because each print was subsequently sold for sixteen ducats, and still those who bought them considered themselves lucky; but poor Herkules did not get any of this, for though he had painted and printed on his shirts and the sheets of his bed (for he also printed paintings), he remained in extreme poverty with his whole family. Finally his sorrowful wife complained that whatever there had
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been of linen had been painted or printed. This depressed Herkules so much, that being at wits end he wanted to drown his sorrows in wine. Against his habit being drunk one evening, he came home, fell down the stairs, and died; opening with his death the eyes of all art lovers who from that time on held his works in the high esteem they deserve, and always will deserve.15
This short passage – however many faults it may have – is an important document on
Segers’s life and has a significant impact on much of the scholarship that has followed.
The impact of this biography and the truths, half-truths, and untruths it contains will be
unpacked hereafter. But we must begin first with what certainties (or near-certainties)
have been culled from the few documents pertaining to Segers’s life.
Hercules Pietersz (Pieterszoon, literally ‘son of Pieter’) Segers was born in 1589
or 1590 to Pieter Segers and Cathalyntgen (Cathalyna) Hercules in Haarlem. The exact
date of his birth is unknown because as a Mennonite, Segers had no baptismal record, and
the year and location were deduced from subsequent documents.16 His father was a
merchant – likely in the textile industry – and accordingly, the first document related to
Segers’s life is a credit receipt for cloth transferred between his father and a merchant.
Segers had a brother Lourens, who was a few years his junior, and sometime in the mid
1590s the family moved to Amsterdam.17 Lourens, like his father, became a cloth
merchant, and perhaps supplied Segers with some of the cloth on which he printed.18 The
first record to properly mention little Hercules (though not by name) is a document from
1607 noting that Pieter Segers had a debt to the estate of the painter Gillis van Coninxloo
15 I have taken Haverkamp-Begemann’s translation but altered parts for purposes of clarity, and in some cases to better match the syntax or meaning of the original Dutch. In the case of the first secntence, I changed the Dutch expression “in my first green years” (“in mijn eerste groene jaren”) to “in my early years.” HB, Hercules Segers, 23-24; Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt, (Davaco Publishers, z.p. 1969), 312. 16 HB, Hercules Segers, 17. The Segers family’s Mennonite status was deduced by Van Eeghen “De Ouders Van Hercules Segers” 17 There are various spellings of his name, including Louwerens. HB, Hercules Segers, 17, 20. 18 Van Eeghen, “De Ouders van Hercules Segers”, Amstelodamum, 73-74. HB, Hercules Segers, 18.
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(1544-1606) for the apprenticeship of his son.19 Later that year, both father and son
attended an auction of Coninxloo’s estate and purchased a number of drawings.20 It is
interesting to note that he bought no prints, though many were auctioned, which perhaps
shows that he had not yet become interested in printmaking and that he was trained in
printing only after 1607 and his time with Coninxloo.
Segers’s father Pieter died around New Years 1612, and was buried at the Nieuwe
Kerk in Amsterdam on January 5th. That same year, Segers joined the painter’s guild of
St. Luke in Haarlem.21 In accordance with guild rules that one must establish a length of
residency in a city before joining, this indicates that he had probably left Amsterdam for
Haarlem at least a year before his father’s death.22 However, it seems his stay in Haarlem
was short-lived, for in December of 1614 a settlement was drawn up in Amsterdam with
the young Marritge Reyers regarding an illegitimate child of theirs.23 Segers promised to
pay eighty florins for defloration and it was agreed that his mother would gain custody
should he die.24 The document names the daughter as Nelletje Hercules.25 Seven days
19 Likely for about a half year of tuition. HB, Hercules Segers, 17. 20 Segers bought ‘various works’(“verscheyden cunsten”), three lots of drawings, a book of drawings, and a mountainscape and his father bought an unidentified expensive object. Pieter also contributed an alabaster sculpture and a panel painting in the auction, indicating that he may have also – to some degree – dealt in paintings, though this is never mentioned as his profession. However, the fact that he only bought one thing confounds such an assertion. J.G.C.A. Briels, De Zuidnederlandse Immigratie in Amsterdam en Haarlem omstreeks 1572-1630: met een keuze van archivalische gegevens, (Nieuwkoop : B. de Graaf, 1974), 236-243; HB, Hercules Segers, 17. 21 Haverkamp-Begemann notes that his joining in 1612 is “very likely, although not absolutely certain.” HB, Hercules Segers, 17. 22 Collins mentions a one or two year “prerequisite residence” before entering a guild. Collins, Hercules Seghers, 19. 23 It is important to note that the two cities are only about twenty kilometers apart – less than a half-day on foot – and Segers likely maintained a strong presence in Amsterdam while living in Haarlem. Segers and his brother were also noted to have debts in Amsterdam earlier in 1614. 24 N.B. 1 florin (fl. or f.) = 1 guilder. For more conversion rates, see Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: the artist, his patrons, and the art market in seventeenth-century Netherlands, (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiv. 25 Abraham Bredius, "Hercules Seghers," Oud Holland 16, no. 1 (1898): 4.
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later, the banns of his marriage to a woman named Anneken van der Brugghen of
Antwerp were posted in Amsterdam. At the time of the posting of the banns, she was
sixteen years his senior, he at twenty-four and she at forty. They were married on January
10th, 1615 at Sloterdijk, a municipality of Amsterdam.26 The discrepancy in age is
curious, and would have raised eyebrows then as it does today.27 Together they filed a
last will and testament, and Anneken van der Brugghen agreed to care for his daughter.
The issue of whether or not the settlement with the mother of his child was related
to the subsequent marriage to another, older woman has been considered by a number of
scholars. Some also note that Van der Brugghen came from a family of no small means –
this deduced from the fact that she had resided for thirteen years in a well to do part of
Amsterdam on the Kalverstraat.28 A year after Segers married Van der Brugghen, he lent
his mother 212 florins for her to pay off debts and in 1619 he bought a house on the
Lindengracht in Amsterdam for about 4000 guilders, and paid for it almost in full.29 The
house was one of the most spacious on the Lindengracht and only a few years old when
he bought it.30 Such a large purchase paid almost in full indicates that at this point, Segers
was not at all destitute. Along with the purchase of a home at this time, Segers’s lending
26 HB, Hercules Segers, 18. 27 HB, Hercules Segers, 20; J.C.H. Heldring, "Hercules Seghers: A Tribute," Oud Holland 72, no. 1/4 (1957): 131. 28 HB, Hercules Segers, 20. 29 For perspective, Rembrandt’s house on the Breestraat was purchased in 1639 for 13,000 guilders, the most any Dutch artist in the seventeenth century had ever paid for a home. Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 44-45. 30 HB, Hercules Segers, 18; The price of 4000 guilders was an estimate by Kannegieter deduced from contemporary prices of similar houses close by. J.Z. Kannegieter, "Het huis van Hercules Segers op de Lindengracht te Amsterdam," Oud Holland 59, no. 1/6 (1942): 153.
11
money to his mother has led some scholars to posit that his marriage was one of
convenience, and that the money had come from his wife’s family.31
Not much is known about the events of the decade during which he occupied the
house on the Lindengracht. An etching of the view from the house’s second or third floor
offers a glimpse into his life there.32 In 1626, two documents show Segers as having
outstanding debts, which do not necessarily indicate financial troubles, since having debts
in the seventeenth century meant that someone thought that you would be able to pay that
debt.33 Paul Crenshaw notes that the debts were “fairly ordinary in nature, and need not
be taken as a sign of poverty.”34 However, in 1631 – despite documents showing a few
prominent collections acquiring his paintings around this time – Segers was forced to sell
his home on the Lindengracht at a substantially lower price than he had paid.35 Though
this quick sale at a low price may be a sign of the sort of poverty anecdotally related by
Hoogstraten, there is not enough evidence outside of the sale to concretely support this.
By May of 1631, he had left Amsterdam and was living on the
Wittevrouwenstraat in Utrecht. His time there was short-lived, as he was noted as having
settled in The Hague in 1632, while working as a dealer of paintings.36 The final
document concerning his life is one of 1638, in which one Cornelia de Witte is mentioned
as the widow of a Hercules Pietersz in The Hague. The lack of any documents 31 First suggested by Kannegieter, “Het huis,” 154. Bredius was the first to note the age discrepancy Bredius, “Hercules Seghers,” 4-5. 32 HB 41. 33 Both Kannegieter and Haverkamp-Begemann describe these debts as the beginning of his financial troubles. Although this may be the case, since debt was common at this time, and we only have two documents showing debts, it is impossible to say for sure whether he was in any financial trouble at this point. Kannegieter, “Het huis,” 155; HB, Hercules Segers, 20. 34 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 161. 35 At 2807 guilders, it was less than three-quarters of the estimated amount he had paid. Moreover, it was sold in 1649 for 5330 guilders, almost double Segers’s price. Kannegieter “Het huis,” 153-155. 36 HB, Hercules Segers, 19.
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mentioning Segers from between 1633 and 1638 show that he probably died around 1634
or 1635, though no exact date is ascertainable. There are no known documents telling the
fate of Segers’s first wife Anneken van der Brugghen either, who – if still alive – would
have been around fifty-seven when he sold the house on the Lindengracht. As fifty-seven
– though not uncommon – was a somewhat advanced age at this time, Segers’s wife’s
death could have been a different motivating factor for the sale of the house and the
artist’s relocation.
Although the two successive relocations may indicate financial instability, various
documents show Segers to have been active in dealing paintings and that his paintings
were still being bought around this time. In 1631 Segers sold around a hundred paintings
(the document does not tell if any of them were of his own making) to Jean Romiti, an
Amsterdam Merchant. The paintings were at the time divided amongst four other
Amsterdammers – each holding about two dozen – indicating that Segers was likely
already dealing in paintings prior to leaving his house on the Lindengracht, where it
seems most of his work was produced. In 1633, a small debt related to his dealing in
paintings is noted.37 Segers’s second occupation was not unusual for artists at this time.
Due to the lack of a proper guild system for painters working in Amsterdam, paintings
were devalued and many painters had to supplement their income with other professions,
perhaps another motivation for leaving the city.38
Contrary to Hoogstraten’s assertion that no one knew or wanted Segers’s works
while he was alive, a number of his paintings are known to have been owned, bought, and
37 HB, Hercules Segers, 19. 38 Though Amsterdam did have a painter’s guild rules were often flouted, and its powers were limited. Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 19-20.
13
sold during his lifetime. As early as March of 1613, a landscape by Segers is recorded in
the death inventory of Amsterdam merchant Jacques Verbeeck.39 Notably, in 1621 one of
Segers’s paintings was included in a large gift to the King of Denmark, in 1627 a number
of his paintings are listed in the collections of the painters Herman Saftleven II and Louys
Rocourt, in 1632 two of his landscapes were bought for the House of Orange in The
Hague, and around 1625 two of his paintings were valued quite high at seventy-two and
thirty-six guilders when listed as prizes in a game of dice.40 The presence of Segers’s
works in prominent collections and their respectable prices shows at least marginal
success as a painter.41 Soon after his death, in 1639, four of his paintings were noted in
the estate inventory of wealthy collector Anthony Gaillard de Jonge.42 In 1640,
Amsterdam art dealer Johannes de Renialme (1600-1657) had at least twenty-one of
Segers’s paintings and twelve unspecified rolled works (probably unmounted paintings,
though possibly rolled prints).43
39 The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories (hereafter as ‘Montias Database’), INVNO 928, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=2112 40 With regards to the high price of Segers’s paintings in the dice game, Heuer estimates an average painting sold for ten to twenty guilders. According to De Marchi and Van Miegeroet, the average price of an original painting in an Amsterdam inventory 1620-1660 was about thirteen guilders. HB, Hercules Segers, 22; Heuer, “Entropic Segers,” 939, footnote 16; Neil de Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “The History of Art Markets,” in Handbook on the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Ginsburgh, Victor A., and C. D. Throsby, (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2006), 75. 41 The average price for a landscape in Amsterdam auctions from 1620 to 1638 was 12 guilders. Montias, Art At Auction In 17th Century Amsterdam, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 90. 42 Montias Database. INVNO 163, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=1361 43 (“no. 54 12 in 2 rollen van Harculus Segers tot 4 pont 't stuck f 288”) I am more confident in supposing these ‘rolled pieces’ were unmounted paintings, since rolls were not the standard way of keeping prints. This was even less likely with Segers’s prints, which are mostly small and would have been easily portable without rolling, not to mention the fact that rolling prints would be much more damaging to the ends than rolling canvases. Although it would make sense to roll prints on fabric, all of the surviving prints on fabric are small enough that a portfolio (or even stacking) would have been more practical. However, the Montias database has each classified as “perhaps a gedruckt schilderij [printed painting] or an illuminated print.” There are no other prints mentioned in the inventory of 107 lots, although there are also no other rolled works. Ackleys states that prints were “mounted in albums, stacked in drawers or chests, and hung on the wall. In the latter case… they might be suspended between two rods, called rollen in Dutch inventories.” In
14
Hoogstraten was, however, still correct in stating that Segers’s reputation
increased considerably after his death.44 In 1657, Renialme had his extensive collection
reappraised, and one of his Segers paintings was evaluated at 300 guilders, when the most
highly-appraised Segers painting had been thirty guilders in his earlier 1640 inventory, a
tenfold increase in value.45 Segers’s works were also still being collected in the
collections of prominent artists in the second half of the seventeenth century. Eight of
Segers’s paintings were listed in the inventory drawn up for Rembrandt’s bankruptcy in
1656, and an inventory taken shortly after the death of Jan van de Capelle (1626-1679) in
1679 showed five paintings in his estate.46
Thus, it has been shown that Hoogstraten was inaccurate in many aspects of his
biography, though these inaccuracies were repeated with confidence in much of the early
scholarship, and occasionally still show up in publications today. Segers, as atypical as
his prints may be, had a fairly typical biography for a painter. Like his contemporaries he
was apprenticed to a reputable painter, Gillis van Coninxloo. Though he may have had
the case of this inventory, these rollen are probably not the wall scrolls as discussed by Ackley. Those rollen were only used for larger prints, so far as I can tell. In any case, in any depicton of prints, smaller ones are always in albums, and if a print is rolled, it is at least bigger than a large book. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), xxxi; Montias Database INVNO, 1040, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=2223 44 Paul Crenshaw has suggested to me that Hoogstraten’s account of the high prices paid for Segers’s prints may have been projecting a bit of nostalgia for a time mid-century when the print market was more inflated, prior to the economic decline in the second half of the century. More on the print bubble mid-century, and Rembrandt’s complicity in it, can be found in Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 97. 45 It could have been one of the same paintings, or a new one. Regardless, the overall value of the paintings had largely increased. HB, Hercules Segers, 23. 46 Jan Van Goyen also wrote the price of one of Segers’s works in a sketchbook of 1650, perhaps indicating that he owned or planned on buying one. Heuer assumes this is a print, but the original Dutch actually just describes it as “een stucken hercles fl. 24.” Heuer also says that Rembrandt owned eight of Segers’s colored prints, which is untrue. These were listed amongst paintings in Rembrandt’s inventory. Rembrandt would have most certainly been able to tell the difference between Segers’s prints and paintings, and based on how things are described it seems Rembrandt was involved in the making of the inventory. HB, Hercules Segers, 22-23; Heuer, “Entropic Segers,” 956, footnotes 15 and 16; Hofstede de Groot and Abraham Bredius (Editors), “A Dutch Sketch-Book of 1650” in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 33, No. 186 (Sep., 1918): 112.
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some financial troubles during his life, there is no indication of abject poverty nor any
reason to believe that he died a destitute drunk. He sold his paintings to support himself,
and like many other painters supplemented his income working as an art dealer. But the
focus of this paper is not Segers as a painter; it is rather the printed works that are of
primary interest in this study. Unlike his biography, his prints are extremely atypical, and
it is critically significant that there exists no document from Segers’s lifetime – apart
from the prints themselves – which would tell us that Segers had ever made a single print:
no contemporary commentary, no copies by other artists, no receipts or auction entries,
and no mention in inventories. From the available documents, Segers the printmaker did
not exist.47
47 On the back of 14Ia, there is a partial inscription that appears to indicate that the owner of the print knew Hercules Segers, or at least knew someone who knew Segers. This has been read as indicating that the owner had seen Segers’s prints while he was alive and was in fact participated in Segers’s workshop practice. Although this is possible, the fragmentary nature makes this conjectural. Though the owner of the print may have known Segers during his lifetime, he may have received the print after his death, which in fact coheres with the theory that the prints passed to someone close to Segers after his death. The inscription is cut off, but what remains reads: “Doen ick met Herckles Pieters Claas en Pa.... na den oouvertoom ghingen,” and repeated and finished in another pen “En paulus na den oüvertoom ghinghen… had ick dit mee.” The variant 17th century spellings make it possible that the meaning is either “I made this with Hercules Pietersz, Claas, and Pa… afterwards went to the Overtoom [where, according to Boon, artists often met to drink]” or “Then Hercules Pietersz, Claas, and Pa… afterwards went to the Overtoom.” The second inscription, in another hand, reads something like “And after Paul went to the Overtoom… I had this along.” Karel Gerard Boon, "Een notitie op een Seghers-prent uit de verzameling Hinloopen," Bulletin Van Het Rijksmuseum 8 (1960): 6-8; HB, Hercules Segers, 3.
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Chapter 2
A HISTORIOGRAPHY
The majority of scholarship on Segers has focused on the prints, more specifically
the technical aspects of his prints, and there are a number of reasons for this. To begin
with, the prints are exceptional amongst seventeenth-century etchings. As mentioned
above, some of his prints employ etching methods that were not used again until the
second half of the eighteenth century, over a hundred years later.48 Other prints employ
strange ways of creating tone that are unprecedented and remain little understood to this
day.49 They are also unconventional in method of production, in that they are hand-
painted, printed on various supports, cropped differently, and further individually
differentiated. Moreover, prints have been the focus of scholarship because they comprise
the majority of surviving documents from Segers’s life. To some degree, it is what
scholars have had to work with.
The first account of Segers’s life is of course from Samuel van Hoogstraten’s
aforementioned Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst of 1678. It appears as
48 Paul Sandby is often credited with the invention of lift-ground in the 1770s, a process then picked up by Thomas Gainsborough. It did not become widely used until well into the nineteenth century. The process was not published until 1866. Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 1400-2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (London: Archetype Publications, 2012), 217-218. 49 One such way, a hatched faux aquatint, will be described more in Chapter III.
17
though Hoogstraten’s interest in Segers was largely limited to prints, and that he derived
details of his biography from them. However, Hoogstraten likely knew at least some of
Segers’s paintings from his time studying under Rembrandt, who owned at least eight of
them. The embellishments of destitution and alcoholism in Segers’s biography seem to be
mere guesses on the part of Hoogstraten, and speak to the haphazard – some might call
them dirty – qualities found in many of Segers’s prints. As Segers was known to print on
textiles, Hoogstraten asserts that he did it out of destitution, using up the family’s linens
and sheets for the sake of printing. In reality, he may have procured his printing textiles
from his brother, a cloth merchant, so that acquiring textiles was likely not difficult for
Segers. This is besides the fact that all of the surviving prints on textiles combined would
not be enough for even one bed sheet, much less an entire wardrobe. Hoogstraten’s
assertion of alcoholism is also suspect, but not impossible. It is conceivable that this
information could have come to Hoogstraten anecdotally, as they were only two
generations removed, but there is no archival or documentary evidence to support it.50
The melancholic artist was a common trope going back to Aristotle, and as Segers’s
biography was placed in the book’s section on how artists have dealt with adversity, it
makes sense that Hoogstraten would have given him this attribute.51 Hoogstraten’s
contributions fall in line with other topoi of the ‘down-on-his-luck’ artist, the
unrecognized genius, and the unappreciated masterpiece. The latter finds its parallel in
50 HB, Hercules Segers, 24. 51 Aristotle saying that “All extraordinary men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts are evidently melancholic.” Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn; The Character and Conduct of Artists: a Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963), 102.
18
the mid-nineteenth century, when Japanese prints were apparently used as packaging
material in porcelain shipments or as wrapping paper for spices.52
In 1718, some forty years after Hoogstraten’s book on painting, his student
Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) published another book, De groote schouburgh der
Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (The great theatre of Dutch painters). In
it, he detailed the lives of many Dutch artists, much in the same vein as Vasari’s Vite and
Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boek. For Segers, he repeated Hoogstraten’s biography with
few changes. However, he notes that Segers’s tragic story is similar to that of Pietro
Testa. He claims that Testa’s prints were unappreciated during his lifetime and were
turned into paper bags for groceries, just as in Segers’s story, and so the dejected Testa
drowned himself in the Tiber. After he had died, Houbraken tell us, his prints fetched a
high price because of their rarity. Thus, though the details of Hoogstraten’s biography of
Segers – repeated by Houbraken – may have been fabricated, there is some truth in what
is said. For, as Hoogstraten notes, Segers did cut a plate up to reuse for other prints, and
the evidence is found in a number of impressions of plates that retain lines from a
previously etched large boat (Figs. 4, 5).53 Segers also regularly printed on textiles, and
he painted many of his prints before and after printing, effectively making “painted
prints.” And lastly, his work did go up considerably in value after his death, and his
reputation did likewise.
52 Auguste Delâtre found Hokusai’s manga used as packing material, Whistler saw his first Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom, and Monet saw them first used as wrapping paper in Holland. It is unclear how many of these accounts are accurate and to what degree, as there was a fashion for claiming to have appreciated them before anyone else, as the Goncourt brothers did: “We were among the first to have this taste. It is now spreading to everything and everyone… Who has cultivated it… more than we; who was excited by the first Japanese prints and had the courage to buy them?” Colta Feller Ives, The Great Wave: the Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974), 12-13. 53 HB 8, HB 21, and HB 17. For a reonstruction of the cut up plate, see HB, Hercules Segers, 106, fig. 8.
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After Hoogstraten, writing about Segers remained largely unchanged until the
nineteenth century, when a number of scholars began publishing archival documents,
from which much of the modern biography has been reconstructed. In 1885, Nicolaas de
Roever published a few documents regarding his apprenticeship to Coninxloo and the
subsequent sale of Coninxloo’s estate.54 In the 1890s, Abraham Bredius published quite a
few documents from Segers’s life; these included debts, legal documents such as Segers
bearing witness to a brawl, his residence in Amsterdam and The Hague, his child with
Marritge Reyers, his marriage to Van der Brugghen, and others.55 Bredius later published
the document relating to Segers entering the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1612.56 In
1929, J. Z. Kannegieter published documents on Segers’s home on the Lindengracht,
where he was also able to estimate the price of the home.57 In the 1960s, Isabella van
Eeghen contributed information about Segers’s parents, deducing that they were a
Mennonites, and published other assorted Segers documents.58
The desperation of the Segers in Hoogstraten’s biography shows that Hoogstraten
saw in his prints a certain amount of instability, financial but also perhaps mental, a
feeling echoed by subsequent scholars, and still voiced today. As Werner Herzog
described them: “His landscapes are not landscapes at all; they are states of mind; full of
angst, desolation, solitude, a state of dreamlike vision.”59 Herzog was again speaking of
54 N. De Roever, "De Coninxloo's." Oud Holland 3, no.1 (1885). 55 Bredius, “Hercules Seghers.” 56 Bredius, “Hercules Seghers,” 19 57 J.Z. Kannegieter, “Het een en ander over de familie Hinloopen en over Michiel Hinloopen in het bijzonder, II,” Oud Holland 46 (1929). 58 Van Eeghen, “De Ouders Ouders Van Hercules Segers.” Amstelodamum, Maandblad Voor De Kennis Van Amsterdam Orgaan Van het Genootschap Amstelodamum 55 (April, 1969). 59 "Whitney Museum of American Art: Werner Herzog," Whitney Museum of American Art, accessed November 6, 2012, http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2012Biennial/WernerHerzog.
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the prints, most likely, since his show at the Whitney Biennial only included projections
of Segers’s printed work. Other scholars have had similar reactions, and some of the
scholarship has attempted psychological readings of his work. In 1922, Wilhelm Fraenger
argued that Segers “sought the portrait of decaying existence in ruins and isolated himself
away in deserts and mountains.”60 By way of his ‘psycho-diagnostic’ method, Fraenger
established a chronology of Segers’s life and work which pictured him slowly descending
into a melancholic state of loneliness and madness.61 He sees in Segers a schizophrenic
quality, saying that “He was a despot and a slave to his craft… his sensual being split into
two poles: cruelty and impotence… both Job and Hercules were in his soul.”62
Though Fraenger’s chronology was not especially well-supported (and is now
largely rejected), it was taken up by a number of other scholars, along with his psycho-
biographical approach. In 1929, Carl Einstein would also see in Segers’s prints a certain
madness. Einstein repeats much of Hoogstraten as fact in his introduction, adding that
Segers had “been prosecuted and convicted for seducing a young girl and getting her
pregnant.”63 Authors like Einstein and Fraenger have a flair for tragic biography. His
psycho-biographical approach is only slightly more dramatic when taken out of context:
Dutch art congeals into a kind of oppressive, petrified horror, or else it dissipates into a flight of planes that lacerate an eye wearied by flaccid, aimless parallels. Expansiveness… is here but a terrified escape. Everywhere the eye collides with densely crowded rocks, with piles of prisons. Such density betrays a despair that
60 “Er suchte das Bildnis absterbenden Daseins in den Ruinen und sonderte sich abseits in die Wüsten und Gebirge.” Wilhelm Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: ein physiognomischer Versuch (Erlenbach-Zuerich: E. Rentsch, 1922), 10. 61 Psycho-diagnosis was, apparently, his own term. HB, Hercules Segers, 26. 62 “Er war Despot und Sklave seines Handwerks. So spaltet sich sein sensuelles Sein in die zwei Pole: Grausamkeit und Ohnmacht… der Hiob und Hercules in seiner Seele zugleich gewesen ist.” Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers, 11. 63 Translation from Carl Einstein and Charles W. Haxthausen, “Critical Dictionary: ‘Nightingale’ the Etchings of Hercules Seghers,” October 107 (2004): 154. Original Carl Einstein, "Gravures d'Hercules Seghers," Documents 1, no. 4 (1929): 202.
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paralyzes like a cramp, a kind of agoraphobia marks these etchings. Here we find a mournful contempt, a disgust with all sociability… The cliché nature morte has here recovered its naked meaning: nature grown rotten, petrified, nature as carcass. 64
Perhaps a “disgust with all sociability” might explain the lack of impact his prints seem
to have made on his contemporaries, but such a disposition would have also likely not led
to two marriages and one child out of wedlock, or a profession as a dealer of paintings.
Published in Documents, a publication cofounded by Einstein with George Bataille, the
influence of psychoanalysis and the surrealists is patent. Einstein sees sexual symbolism
everywhere, in the “phallic menhirs” and “hollowed-out valleys,” all signs of Segers’s
obsession with his own impotence and masochism.65 He concludes, “He hides in the
landscape, but because of his fear of representing repressed erotic figurations, these are
manifested in a veiled manner, and the rocks teem with hidden nudes and monsters,
symptoms of an atavistic layer.”66 Einstein is eloquent and his writing is enjoyable, but it
is more poetry than it is history.
G. Knuttel continues the narrative of Segers as depressed madman, relying on
both the chronology and biography established by Fraenger. Knuttel believes that
Segers’s working method was a self-propagating catharsis that both released and
exacerbated his madness, driving him “deeper and deeper into a hellish fantasy world of
death, damnation and loneliness.”67 J.C.H. Heldring’s publication of 1957 contributes to
the discussion of Segers’s psyche in a different way. Though he relies somewhat on the 64 Einstein and Haxthausen, “Nightingale,” 202-03. 65 Einstein and Haxthausen, “Nightingale,” 157. 66 Einstein and Haxthausen, “Nightingale,” 157. 67 Orignial: “zelfkwellende werkwijzen en steeds dieper werd voortgejaagd in een helsche verbeeldingswereld van dood en verdoemenis en verlatenheid…” Knuttel goes as far as titling one of the four sections of his book “Demonische Scheppingsdrang,” or, “Demonic Creative Impulse.” G. Knuttel, Hercules Seghers: met vijf en veertig afbeeldingen (Amsterdam: Becht, 1940), 59; Translation from HB, Hercules Segers, 6.
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work of Knuttel, he also refutes certain parts of that timeline. Moreover, he draws
different conclusions. Beginning with the age discrepancy between Segers and his wife
Anneken van der Brugghen, Heldring sees in the prints a sense of “wanderlust.” He
argues that after fathering Marritge Reyers’s illegitimate child, Segers makes the
pragmatic decision to marry the well off Van der Brugghen but is then stuck in a loveless
marriage. He claims that Segers, after having traveled the continent from around 1607 to
1610 (an issue we will return to), longs for the scenery he saw in his youth:
The history of Dutch painters has produced no more ludicrous paradox than this young genius inspired by and longing for exotic scenery, tied to a partner so much older than himself. For, surely, no wife would allow her husband - sixteen years her junior and whose natural child she has in care - to travel, without realizing that she would thus resign all control and commit her husband to the doubtful currents of foreign life.68
However appealing this romantic interpretation of Segers may be, it is pure speculation
and has no basis in the prints. Again, a good story is not always good history.
Haverkamp-Begemann derides such psycho-social interpretations of Segers’s
work when he evaluates the earlier level-headed publications of Frenzel from 1829-1830,
who he says “wisely refrained from speculating on the nature of the man.”69 Frenzel
instead catalogued known prints by Segers and undertook a technical analysis of them,
successfully identifying some of the processes used.70 Jaro Springer also created a large
catalogue of Segers’s prints from 1910 to 1912, including almost all of the prints now
known as Segers’s oeuvre, along with a few more that have subsequently been attributed
68 Heldring, “Hercules Seghers: A Tribute,” 134-135. 69 HB, Hercules Segers, 26. 70 J.G.A. Frenzel, “Hercules Zegers, Zetigenosse Paul Potter’s Maler und Kupferstecher und Erfinder der Kunst, durch Kupferabdrücke mit Mehreren Farben Gemälde nachzeuahmen” Kunst-Blatt, Zehnter Jahrgang 1829, herausgegeben von Ludwig Schorn Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, no. 18 (69-72), no. 19 (73-76), no. 32 (125-128), 1829-1830.
23
to Johannes Ruyscher (c.1625-after 1675).71 Springer’s unfinished text for the catalogue
was published posthumously in 1915. Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann’s massive catalogue
of 1973 on Segers’s prints is still the most comprehensive and accurate assessment of
Segers’s life and work. It compiled all of the known prints at the time, a biography,
historiography, and detailed technical analyses of each individual print, as well as an
introduction by K.G. Boon and a supplemental section on Johannes Ruyscher, the artist
called ‘de jonge hercules’ because of his similarity of style. Moreover, Haverkamp-
Begemann was the first to really understand Segers’s unique method of creating grey
tones by way of combining superfine crosshatching with stopping out ground.
One question that persists in the historiography of Segers is whether or not he had
ever traveled outside of Holland, and in particular, crossed the Alps into Italy. It figures
prominently into Heldring’s argument about ‘wanderlust’ and Segers’s longing for days
gone past. Leo Collins also believed Segers’s made it to Italy. In his book of 1953 – the
first monograph on Segers to be published in English – Collins invoked the likes of
Wilhelm Bode, Abraham Bredius, Hofstede de Groot, and Wilhelm Fraenger as others
who supported the theory of an Italian sojourn.72 Although Segers’s Italian sojourn was
generally accepted in earlier scholarship, the issue has seen more contention since
Haverkamp-Begemann’s 1973 catalogue. Though Haverkamp-Begemann conceded a
possible trip to Brussels later in life, he found little to no support for an Alpine or Italian
trip.73 Since Haverkamp-Begemann the consensus has leaned towards the negative. For
71 HB, Hercules Segers, 26; Jaro Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1910); For a list of misattributions and corresponding Springer and HB numbers, see HB, Hercules Segers, 95-96. 72 Collins, Hercules Seghers, 18. 73 HB, Hercules Segers, 30.
24
the purposes of the present study, Segers’s theoretical time in Italy is not of particular
importance, except for the fact that it relates to another question prominent in the
historiography of Hercules Segers: where, when, and under whom did Segers receive his
training as an etcher? The extremely complex processes used by Segers indicate that he
was most likely trained by a skilled etcher. Leo Collins primarily made the argument for
Segers’s time in Italy because he believed that Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) trained
Hercules Segers in the art of etching while in Rome, and that Segers brought his
knowledge back to Haarlem where he taught the process to Willem Buytewech (1591/2-
1624) and Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630), instigating a “renaissance of etching.”74
Collins argued that Segers’s trip to Italy fit within the period of time from 1607,
when he was mentioned at the sale of Coninxloo’s estate, and a few months before 1612,
when he joined the painter’s guild of Haarlem. Indeed, in the surviving documents on
Segers, there is a gap during these years larger than any other during his adult life.
Perhaps the lack of documents during this time does indicate Segers having been out of
Holland. However, this does not necessitate a trip to Italy, and the various other points
Collins made can be refuted without too much effort. Collins built his argument for
Elsheimer as Segers’s teacher based on a number of things. He first claimed that etching
fell out of favor in Holland after Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), and engraving remained
the primary means of printmaking. He argued that the influence of Hendrik Goltzius
(1588-1617) in Haarlem should have resulted in more engravers in the next generation,
but that something from outside instigated a revival of etching around the year of
74 Collins, Hercules Seghers, 18, 21.
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Segers’s return.75 He asserted that Segers had met Elsheimer whilst in Rome, and learned
from him the secrets of his etching technique. Among these secrets was the recipe for a
new softer etching ground, which would allow for more detail. This ground impressed
Rubens enough for him to mention it in a letter to Pieter van Veen many years later,
where he describes it as a white paste.76 Collins is convinced that this is the etching
ground Segers used as well, and that he brought this back to Haarlem and prompted a
revival in etching.77 Segers’s copy made after Elsheimer’s Tobias and the Angel (HB 1,
Figs. 6, 7) also served to buttress his argument.
However, contrary to Collins’s assertion, a number of artists were working in
Haarlem and Amsterdam etching landscapes around the turn of the century, both
preceding and during the time Segers was supposedly acquiring the art from Elsheimer.
Willem Adriaensz van Nieulandt II (1584-1635), whose brother Adriaen van Nieulandt II
(1586-1658) was also at the 1607 auction of Coninxloo’s estate, was already working as a
landscape etcher around 1600 to 1610.78 There is no reason Segers would have had to
cross the Alps to find an etcher who could show him the craft. In fact, Segers could have
met Adriaen or even Willem van Nieulandt at the auction of 1607 (the latter may have
been in attendance, but simply not bought anything). Jacob Savery, Willem van
75 Collins, Hercules Seghers, 15-16. 76 Emile Michel and Elizabeth Lee, Rubens: His Life, His Work, and His Time (London: W. Heinemann, 1899), 276. 77 Collins, Hercules Seghers, 17-18. 78 Willem’s father and brother were both named Adriaen. His grandfather and great grandfather were both named Willem. His brother and grandfather were both painters, and his great grandfather probably was as well, since he was a member of the St. Luke’s guild. This has led to some confusion. There were many more painters in their extended family, as well as more Adriaens, Willems, and a number of Jacobs. The Adriaen van Nieulandt discussed here is sometimes listed as Adriaen van Nieulandt I, the reason for this is perhaps confusion due to the numerous Adriaens in the family. Briels, De Zuidnederlandse, 82-83, 241-243; Ph. van Hille, “De Familie van Nieuland,” Vlaamse stam : maandblad van de Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde 1 (1965): 259-261; Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (hereafter as ‘RKD’), “Nieulandt, Adriaen van (I),” RKD Online Database, http://www.rkd.nl/rkddb/
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Nieulandt’s teacher, was also a landscape etcher working in Haarlem and Amsterdam.79
He died in 1604, perhaps too early for him to be a candidate for the role of Segers’s
teacher, but the fact remains that other etchers were working in Haarlem prior to 1612.
Further discounting both Segers’s time in Italy and his apprenticeship to Elsheimer is the
fact – first pointed out by Van Regteren Altena in 1955 – that one of his two etchings of
Roman ruins is a copy after an etching by Willem van Nieulandt (Figs. 8, 9), and the
other is compositionally similar enough to be a variation thereof.80 The question of when,
where, and from whom Segers gained his advanced knowledge of etching remains one of
the great unanswered questions about his life and work, but I offer Willem van Nieulandt
here as a distinct possibility.
Segers painted oeuvre is also contested in the historiography, if addressed at all.
Apart from his argument about Segers and Elsheimer, Collins offered the first overview
of adding a number of works to the oeuvre of Segers, mostly paintings, though also a few
prints. These additions have largely been ignored and refuted by subsequent
scholarship.81 Seymour Slive noted that Collins ascribed – without satisfactory support –
thirty paintings to Segers, while scholars at the time agreed no more than fifteen could be
attributed with any degree of certainty.82 Today, that number has dwindled to a dozen.
Haverkamp-Begemann’s 1973 monograph, perhaps wisely, avoids an in-depth
79 RKD, "Nieulandt, Willem van (II)". 80 Segers’s etchings after Nieulandt are HB 42 and 43. Though Altena believes Segers copied a copy of Van Nieulandt’s etching published by Visscher in 1618, Haverkamp-Begemann does not agree that this is necessarily true. HB, Hercules Segers, 88; J.Q. van Regteren Altena, "Hercules Seghers en de topografie," Bulletin Van Het Rijksmuseum 3, no. 1 (1955). 81 See Eduard Trautscholdt, review of Hercules Seghers, by Leo C. Collins, The Burlington Magazine 97, no. 632 (1955): 357-358. 82 Slive, “Hercules Seghers by Leo C. Collins,” 304-306.
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examination of Segers’s paintings. Still, an updated catalogue and discussion of Segers’s
painted work is noticeably absent from the scholarship.83
This historiography was intended to give the reader an impression of the state of
the literature, and to provide a backdrop against which this study can differentiate itself.
Hoogstraten’s biography remains central in any discussion of Segers’s works, as much
for its accuracies as its inaccuracies. In the present study, Hoogstraten’s descriptions of
Segers’s unique printing methods will be the most relevant, while his assertions of
Segers’s high production will be challenged. Haverkamp-Begemann’s catalogue will be
relied on throughout, and is the source of the numbering system used to describe the
prints – as their titles are often similar, and can be easily confused. The early psycho-
biographies demonstrate the pitfalls that scholars have resorted to in the absence of more
concrete information. For the present study, they remain hazards to be avoided. Indeed,
Werner Herzog is guilty of projecting his own ideas on the psyche of Hercules Segers.
83 Such a catalogue would be difficult to assemble. One personal anecdote serves as evidence. While at the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam I noticed a small painting on a high shelf in a corner of one of the rooms. Unlike the carefully hung works elsewhere in the house which included labels with artist, year, title, etc, this painting was undistinguished amongst other studio ‘props’. Attached to the frame was an early 20th century (or possibly even late 19th) placard that read “HERCULES SEGHERS / IN BRUIKLEEN VAN MR P.W. DEKONING.” This painting clearly came from the same collection as the Rembrandthuis’s impression 27Id. It is – to my knowledge – unpublished. Not even Collins’s generous monograph has listed it as a work of Segers. The provenance lends some credence to a genuine attribution, as it came from a collection with a genuine Segers print. Rembrandthuis curator Jaap van Veen has subsequently removed the painting from the frame and examined it with Peter Klein and Ad Stijnman. It appears to be oil on paper and pasted to panel, but a definite attribution remains elusive. Regardless, the point here is that there are many attributed works as well as unknown or unpublished works scattered throughout Europe and elsewhere, and these works are almost all unsigned.
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Chapter 3
THE PRINTS - RECONSTRUCTING A PRIVATE PRACTICE
We come now to the central focus of this paper - Segers’s prints. As mentioned
above, previous scholarship has put much effort into establishing Segers’s working
methods in terms of technical innovation. Haverkamp-Begemann created a rigorous
catalogue of the processes employed (i.e. lift-ground, hatching, drypoint, etc.), along with
descriptions of the support and its treatment (paper or fabric, varnished, counterproofed,
hand-colored, etc.), and other considerations such as inscriptions and relations to other
prints. Willem van Leusden went as far as to faithfully recreate a number of Segers’s
etchings, reconstructing the lift-ground methods used by Segers.84 However, technical
analysis, thorough as it may be, has largely ignored the prints as objects. The prints bear
markings uncharacteristic of a man making prints for sale on the market. He was not
printing his work in the manner of a man intending to sell them, and issues of
marketability seem far from his mind.
To begin with, his prints are made in a way that subverts all of the advantages of
the print medium, namely its ability to produce large numbers of nearly identical images 84 Van Leusden also offers a step-by-step process explaining how one would go about recreating the prints. He also groups Segers’s etchings into a reductive chronology of “three periods” entirely dependent on technical qualities, which is perhaps problematic for its simplicity. Van Leusden, The Etchings of Hercules Seghers and the Problem of his Graphic Technique.
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quickly. Though creating the printing plate could take more time than a drawing – or
even a painting – the payoff was that once finished, it could be printed many times with
much less effort. One such subversion of the medium is the unique hand-painting of
individual prints – a practice peculiar to Segers. Though hand-painting was done before
Segers, it had not been done by the printer so as to individualize each and every print.85
Albrecht Altdorfer’s (1480-1538) landscape etchings from the early 1520s survive in one
set of colored impressions at the Albertina, but nearly all the rest are uncolored, and in
any case may have been colored by subsequent owners.86 Some of Pieter Bruegel’s prints
are colored, but the colorists are again unknown.87 Regardless, the practice of coloring
prints was looked down upon in the seventeenth-century, with one Dutch author
remarking that “to color prints is to spoil prints.”88 Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) had
similar feelings about the coloring of prints when he discussed the works of Albrecht
Dürer in 1528: “These things he places before the eye in the most pertinent lines – black
ones, so that if you should spread on pigments you would injure the work.”89 This
sentiment, however, may not have applied to Segers’s prints because the artist had
intended for his etchings to be colored, and he himself applied the color to each
individual impression; but it is hard to say for sure one way or another since there was
really no precedent for his practice. 85 Sometimes owners would color their prints, and in some occasions it seems as though the artist may have colored one or two impressions of their own prints, but nothing on the scale of Segers’s production. 86 Wood believes that the coloring was not applied by Altdorfer himself, but may have been overseen by him. Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 256-259. 87 Dackerman, Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 139-141, 159, 251-252. 88 Dackerman, Painted Prints, 1; Geerard ter Brugge and Wilhelmus Goeree, Verligterie-kunde, of regt gebruik der water-verwen… (T'Amsteldam: by Andries van Damme, 1705), 8. 89 Dackerman, Painted Prints, 2.
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The multiplicity, consistency, and potential quantity of the print yield are entirely
undermined by Segers’s practice of individualizing his prints. Of the 183 surviving
impressions, no two look alike. Of the fifty-four total plates, twenty-two survive in only a
single impression, but even multiple impressions from the same plate can be
unrecognizably different. HB 21, River Valley with a Waterfall, Version I, is only one of
a number of examples (Fig. 10). It survives in five impressions found in Warsaw (HB
21Ia), Berlin (HB 21IIb), Dresden (HB 21IIc), and Amsterdam (HB 21IIId and HB 21IVe).
They differ as follows:
HB 21Ia - dark brown ink / cloth, prepared brown / light yellow oil overpaint HB 21IIb - blue ink / paper, prepared gray-blue / selective yellow watercolor overpaint HB 21IIc - dark green ink / paper, prepared off-white (pinkish) / green overpaint HB 21IIId - blue ink / yellow paper, prepared gray-blue / varnished HB 21IVe - very dark green ink / off-white paper / brownish green overpaint
No two impressions of HB 21 are printed in the same ink, or on the same prepared
support, or overpainted in the same way. This is all ignoring the fact that they are
different states and that they are cropped differently as well. Strangely enough, he also
sometimes faithfully repeated his compositions from earlier plates, often transferring the
prior image to a new plate and working it again with some changes – sometimes subtle.
Partly because of the fact that Segers’s prints taken from the same plate can vary so
greatly and partly because of his method of transferring designs from one plate to
another, separate plates have in the past been mistaken for simply different states of the
same plate. This is the case with HB 21 and its compositional duplicate HB 22 (Fig. 11),
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which were at one point thought to be the same plate.90 Repetitions of other compositions
can be found in HB 15 and 16, 19 and 20, and 23 and 24.
The low survival of Segers’s prints suggests very small runs, although a few
prints have survived in upwards of ten impressions. HB 13, The Enclosed Valley,
survives in twenty-one impressions and one counterproof, the most impressions of any of
his plates. The prints come in four states: eight impressions and the counterproof from
state I, three from state II, eight from state III, and two from state IV.91 The distribution
of the surviving prints likely indicates that no single state was printed at a substantially
higher quantity than the others. Moreover, the individualization of each print with
different inks, supports, and overpainting suggest that they were printed over a long
period of time, rather than all at once. Even today – with inks that come in cans, cleaning
supplies that easily cut through grease, and convenient access to cheap newsprint and
rags – printing a single plate in different inks on different supports would be both time
consuming and contrary to the advantages of the print medium. In Segers’s time,
preparation and clean up of the inks and support for one color combination would have
likely taken hours.92
90 Frenzel believed HB 22 to simply be another state of HB 21. HB, Hercules Segers, 77. 91 In the first state the image was simply etched. In state II, drypoint tone was added in some area by way of hatched parallel lines. In state III, some of the drypoint had either worn down or been burnished away, and more was added elsewhere. In the fourth and final state, small round dots were etched in some areas to create tone. 92 Ad Stijnman – who has experimented with preparing and grinding his own inks as well as etching plates with seventeenth-century processes – described the hand grinding of ink as “slow, time-consuming and laborious.” He estimates that a spoonful of ink would take about twenty minutes, not including time for set up, clean up, or preparation of oils and pigments. Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 280-281; One must also keep in mind that Segers’s process may have been slightly different, as colored printing inks were not readily available and he himself was likely using altered painting pigments. Thus, unique colored inks meant more time spent experimenting to get correct consistencies.
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One must also take note of the fact that the final state has fewer impressions.
Segers was not working towards a ‘finished state’ which would be printed in large runs.
Instead, the consistent printing throughout the states resembles the act of proofing a work
in progress: he worked up the plate, printed it in a number of iterations, worked it more,
printed it more, and so forth.93 By these indications, nothing about the working practice
of Hercules Segers resembles his contemporaries, who would typically work up the plate
to a satisfactory level, taking a few proof impressions along the way, and eventually stop
working it in order to print large runs for sale on the market.94 For standard prints, after
completion further states were often the result of the plate changing hands, and publishers
making changes to the titles or inscriptions, or sometimes retouching worn-down plates.
They are practical, rather than creative concerns.
We must also ask what, for our purposes, constitutes a finished print. As nearly
every impression of this plate is worked up in different ways, using different inks on
different supports, might we consider every impression finished? Does the fact that the
plate was subsequently changed show that he felt the print was unfinished? With other
artists, trial or process proofs are often considered unfinished, but with Segers, many trial
proofs seem to have been an ends in and of themselves, rather than a means to an end.
Some of Segers’s prints are counterproofs, a technique typically used by artists as
93 For more on the “proof state” or “working proof” as a tool for the printmaker, see Peter W. Parshall, “Unfinished Business,” in The Unfinished Print, ed. Peter Parshall et al (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 13. 94 This is not a hard and fast rule, however. Parshall addresses the problems inherent in the idea of the ‘proof state’ in The Unfinished Print. However, publishing practices in Haarlem in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were fairly consistent when it came to this. Although a number of Goltzius’s ‘unfinished’ prints were circulated, this was done by his son-in-law Jacob Matham, and the story goes that Goltzius himself did not want his work to be circulated in an incomplete form. Thus, it was probably published after Goltzius’s death, and no doubt after he transferred his publishing shop to his son-in-law. Parshall, “Unfinished Business,” 13, 17.
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printer’s proofs in order to – as printer William Faithorne (1616-1691) put it – “see better
how to correct, because the said Counterproof is according to the Draught, viz. turn’d the
same side.”95 Once a print was counterproofed, one could make changes to the print, and
then follow it as a guide on the plate.96 Contrary to this practice, Segers’s counterproofs
are worked up in the same manner as his regular prints, and survive in relatively high
numbers.97 For Segers, counterproofing was simply another tool with which to vary the
myriad iterations possible from a single plate.98 Rather than being used as process proofs
for correction, they too, are ends in and of themselves. Does this mean that Segers made
no process proofs in the traditional sense, impressions that he himself would have
considered unfinished? Such questions are complicated because marketability was
ostensibly not a concern for Segers.
HB 4Ib and HB 6Ib (Figs. 12, 13) help to address the question of whether or not
Segers might have seen any of his prints as unfinished. The prints are a rare example of a 95 William Faithorne, The Art of Graving and Etching Wherein Is Express'd the True Way of Graving in Copper. Also the Manner and Method of the Famous Callot, and Mr. Bosse... (Published by William Faithorne. London: Printed for A. Roper, 1702), 70; This is, in fact, the way Rembrandt used counterproofs, accounts of which is found in Christopher White, Rembrandt As an Etcher; A Study of the Artist at Work, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 18, 99-100. 96 Counterproofing was also done with drawings, but the purposes for this varied. One might make a counterproof of a drawing in order to double the drawing, doubling the amount of drawings you could sell. One might also counterproof in order to see what the composition would look like reversed, and – when sketching figures – to effectively double the number of poses you had to work from. These uses were not usually employed in prints since the plate was already reversed, prints could be printed many times regardless, and because counterproofing the print took almost as much effort as printing another (most likely better) impression directly from the plate. For uses of counterproofed drawings, see Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 111-112. See also Marjorie Cohn, “Red Chalk: Historical and Technical Perspectives” in Drawings Defined, ed. W. Strauss and T. Felker (New York, 1987), 166-169. 97 HB 13Ii, HB 15Ia, HB 17Ia, HB 23IIf, HB 27Io, and possibly HB 11 are all counterproof impressions. Moreover, Haverkamp-Begemann has noted evidence of counterproofing (in the form of flattened ink, cloth imprints, etc.) in a number of other impressions (HB 13IIIp, HB 26e, and less probably HB 13IIIu). For more on counterproofing, see Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 321. 98 Counterproofs were, however, sometimes seen as finished works of art when taken from red chalk drawings. As red chalk smudges easily, they were often counterproofed to take off the excess chalk. These counterproofs would also be sold. For more on this, see Cohn, “Red Chalk: Historical and Technical Perspectives” in Drawings Defined, 167-168.
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printmaker printing on the back of one of his own prints. Though the practice happened
occasionally in books, in single sheet prints it is exceedingly rare. 4Ib was printed first,
clear from a crease that prevented printing at the far left of 6Ib. 6Ib is also a maculature
print, which were typically done to clean plates rather than make sellable images.99 In a
discussion of one of Rembrandt’s maculature impressions, Christopher White describes it
as “clearly one of those sheets of paper which lie around in a printmaker’s studio, only to
be thrown away after they have served their purpose.”100 Perhaps this was the reason for
Segers’s impression, though he may also have simply liked the way that maculature
prints looked. The lack of subsequent coloring of both impressions suggests that Segers
may have been unsatisfied with them, and for that reason did not work them further. It is
also possible that Segers had printed 4Ib and – unhappy with the result – used the verso to
clean the plate resulting in HB 6Ib. However, nothing seems substantially different
between impression HB 4Ia and 4Ib, so it is curious that he would have discarded one
while keeping the other. In fact, the latter appears to be a better impression, as 4Ia has
more dark spots of foul-biting in the sky.101
What can we make of the survival of such a print? On the market, it would have
had little value. Printing on both sides of the print effectively made it a curiosity rather
than a commodity. Process prints were not something to be collected until at least the
second half of the seventeenth century, and even these tended to be more polished – or at
99 HB 6Ib. For more on maculature impressions, as well as cleaning the plate more generally, see Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 325-326. 100 White continues “And on this occasion, he was in an economical mood and used the other side to take a counterproof from an impression of the same state.” White, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 100. 101 All three impressions show foul-biting, and an argument can and has been made that the foul-biting enhances the atmospheric effects of his prints, and the diagonal streaks in particular – like those found in HB 4 – emulate clouds. However, 4Ia also shows small circular spots that are perhaps less conducive to being read as clouds.
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least cleaner – than what we see here.102 Moreover, prints at this time were often pasted
into books or on walls, which was no longer possible without destroying one of the
images. For the aforementioned reasons, prints such as this – potentially the byproduct of
a working process typically discarded after use – do not survive. Yet, from Segers we
have not only this example, but another in HB 43a and 43b, printed on both sides of a
single sheet. One possibility for the survival of these double-sided prints is that they had
been kept in the artist’s collection and were then distributed with the rest of his prints
after his death. As part of a lot, they were less likely to have been discarded. Either way,
they support a theory of limited print runs. If Segers had printed many impressions of HB
4, and better impressions had been available, why would this double-sided anomaly have
survived?103 Are we to believe that Segers was printing and distributing HB 43 in the
Haarlem and Amsterdam print markets, yet somehow the only surviving evidence is
found in two somewhat poorly printed partial impressions on either side of a single sheet
of paper? It is extremely implausible that if he had distributed these prints on the market,
only this unsellable process-proof survived.
Besides the individualization of Segers’s prints, the processes he used also set him
apart from his peers. As mentioned earlier, Segers invented the lift-ground technique of
etching, which was not discovered again until a century later (Fig. 27).104 He also
employed a method that predates aquatint, but gives a similar tonal impression by way of
102 Despite the increased value placed on the ‘process print,’ Houbraken still considered it a negative that Rembrandt had left so many prints “only half-completed.” For more on the market for and valuation of ‘unfinished’ prints and process proofs, see Parshall “Unfinished Business,” 24-25. 103 A similar question was asked with regard to a number of poorly printed Mantegna impressions: “Would Mantegna have kept such unsatisfactory impressions had better ones been readily available?” Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 69. 104 For more on the lift-ground process, see Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 52, 216-217
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dense hatching (Figs. 14, 15). Segers first coated the plate ground and then covered the
entire plate in superfine crosshatching.105 Then, stopping out areas he wanted to print
white, he etched the plate for a short amount of time. This created gray tonal areas, which
he would later etch dark lines over, effectively creating black, grey, and white areas. One
drawback of this method was that the gray areas faded quickly while printing, due to the
all-over lines and shallow biting, which limited the number of impressions one could
pull.106 Segers also employed a method of very fine drypoint hatching which would take
ink in a fuzzy manner as a means to create tone (Fig. 16).107 He would typically add this
hatching after having already etched and printed the image. However, the drypoint burrs
would wear down quickly and cease to take ink, and even more so than with the ‘proto-
aquatint’, the plate would wear down quickly.108 These were problems that would have
troubled a printmaker intending to print his plates in great numbers, or one intending to
sell his plates to print publishers. However, these problems apparently did not concern
him, as he continued to employ the same processes. The implications are that he was
105 The ground would have been relatively soft to allow such fine hatching, and would likely have been applied extremely thinly, so that while hatching, the ground would not ‘gunk’ up the surface of the plate with globs of ground. This is a problem I have had when hatching through a thicker ground; the ground that has been drawn through tends to accumulate in globs. 106 Most of the prints executed in this style do not survive in more than one or two impressions (HB 1, 12, 18, 34, 41, 42, 48, and 49). The exceptions are HB 2 (five impressions), HB 22 (eleven), and HB 46 (six), though the latter two were perhaps not done in the hatched ground method. This makes claims about plate degradation difficult to demonstrate with the prints. But one might liken the rough surface of the plate to mezzotint, which does degrade much more quickly than line etching. One can also relate it to rapid wear seen in Rembrandt’s prints with densely hatched fine lines. Erik Hinterding, “Watermark Research as a Tool for the Study of Rembrandt's etchings,” in Rembrandt, the Printmaker by Hinterding et al. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Pub, 2000), 33. 107 Rembrandt’s use of drypoint to create tone is well documented and will be discussed later. 108 Hinterding estimates that one can pull about fifty reasonable impressions from a plate with drypoint. The extremely fine drypoint of Segers would have survived even fewer, possibly as few as five or ten. Erik Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher: The practice of production and distribution, trans. Michael Hoyle (Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision, 2006), 50.
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indifferent to the potential yield of his plates, something that would have been of great
importance to someone wanting to print great quantities for sale on the market.
Another hindrance to marketability of Segers’s prints was the messiness of his
plates. Many of his prints have peculiarities that one might describe as marginalia. In the
empty spaces of his plates, Segers often etched lines, apparently in order to test his needle
or try out some hatching techniques. Some extreme examples of this practice can be
found in HB 12b and HB 22IIe (Figs. 2, 11), both in the Rijksmuseum. HB 12b,
introduced in Chapter I, features every kind of mark you can imagine, foul-bite, spit-bite,
lift-ground, hatching, crosshatching, drypoint, etc.; but these marks are not relegated to a
small portion of the corner of the print. Rather, they take up the entire top half of the
print, covering the sky in black blobs and floating marks. The legibility of the image is
vastly compromised, and similar issues are present in 22IIe. These supposed ‘tests’ of the
needle and the ground are perhaps one of the largest obstacles to placing Segers works
within the more marketable works of his contemporaries. One does not test their needle
and ground in the middle of a plate unless it is a test plate. The fact that HB 22 survives
in more impressions than all but two other plates shows that he deemed it worth printing,
if only for himself. These details present a man not only unconcerned with the salability
of his prints, but even the clarity and legibility of his images.
One might place in this category the aforementioned HB 17IIb and 21IIb, in which
the remnants of a sailboat are left unburnished, with landscapes etched overtop. It is
significant that Segers not only left these details unburnished, but highlighted them by
placing them in the sky, when he could have easily placed them at the bottom of the
composition so that the rock formations might have better concealed them. The
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juxtaposition of a ship’s rigging with a mountain landscape is almost surrealist. Perhaps
these qualities are what compelled Herzog to call him “the first modern artist.”
HB 44a and b (Figs. 17, 18) serve as more examples of Segers’s unusual working
practices. 44a is almost a standard view of ruins, cropped to preserve some stray etched
lines tested outside the margins. However, one notices that in the sky to the right, there
are stray “test” lines as well. If not for these few lines, this would have been a work
entirely fit for the market, resembling works of Segers’s contemporaries printing in
Haarlem at the same time. The British Museum’s curatorial notes describe this print as
“probably unfinished.” This description is unsatisfactory in explaining what is happening
here. The print could be considered finished if not for these extraneous lines. In fact,
without these lines it in many ways resembles the works of Willem Buytewech and
Esaias van de Velde being published at the same time, comparisons that will be further
addressed in the next chapter. The stray etched lines are not indicative of an unfinished
print, but rather they reflect an attitude towards the print as always a work in progress,
unconcerned with the notion of a ‘finished’ artwork. How many of Segers’s prints might
be considered in any way ‘finished’? Over two dozen of Segers’s prints include similar
extraneous markings, with many of them worked up further after being printed.109 Are all
of these ‘unfinished’ prints? Had the markings troubled Segers, he could have easily
covered them up when over-painting, or with more work burnished them from the plates.
109 HB 12, 22, 34, 41, 42, 44, 46, and 52 all show these sorts of marks. The fourth and final state of HB 22, surviving in only one impression (HB 22IVl, with ten impressions of previous states) is the only print in which the markings are burnished out so as to show an empty sky, free of marks. In earlier states of this impression, sometimes a few of the stray test markings are burnished out, only for new ones to be drawn over top of them. HB 44b is an intriguing example because Haverkamp-Begemann says the entire print is lift-ground except for the extraneous markings, which were drypoint and etched needle lines. There was no reason for Segers to have been ‘testing’ his drypoint lines or etching lines on this particular plate, since there occurred nowhere else on it.
39
Moreover, only one of his prints bears any potential claim to authorship – in the form of a
garbled possible monogram – and not a single one carries a date.110 Though not all artists
signed their works at this time, the gesture of a signature reflected a stamp of approval
before the work went out into the world, and Segers’s lack of signatures supports the idea
that he had not intended these works for the market.111
HB 44b makes clearer the experimental mode within which Segers was working.
Above the ruins, cropped out in 44a – is an ominous black fuzzy blob, for lack of a better
word. This ball is the result of dense drypoint crosshatching executed with the help of a
straightedge, with some indications of acid exposure as well.112 This sort of marking is
not haphazardly added to a composition, and it is not easy to remove once added.
Repeatedly and systematically gouging a stylus directly into a copper plate is not
something that happens accidentally; the plate resists. To call this simply an unfinished
print is to believe that Segers was working towards a finished product. But the floating
mass tells no such story. It tells the story of someone experimenting on the surface of his
plates, with little regard to the salability of his prints. The images are hauntingly
beautiful, to be sure, and these idiosyncrasies have led to all kinds of assertions about his
mental instability or even his repressed sexual aggression and impotence. But for Segers,
the messy idiosyncrasies scratched into the skies of HB 44 must not have detracted from 110 HB 49 bears scribbles in the foreground which have been interpreted as a possible “H S,” but they are by no means conclusive. The dense scribbles covering the surface and delineating the forms of the entire print make any such reading problematic. HB, Hercules Segers, 92. 111 One needs only to think of the claims of authorship on countless prints by way of names followed by “…fecit” or “…excudi.” In fact, these signatures are almost standard in the prints published by Visscher discussed in the next chapter. 112 Haverkamp-Begemann also calls the print unfinished. He believes the space between the two borderlines were meant for a caption. However, given the fact that no print of Segers bears any caption, this seems unlikely. It is possible that Segers was experimenting with framing devices, as he was wont to crop his prints in any number of ways, thereby framing them differently; these two prints are example enough of that. HB, Hercules Segers, 89.
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the image, for he left them unburnished and similar markings remain a hallmark of his
more peculiar prints. Thus, it seems more and more likely that the only audience these
prints were ever intended to have was Hercules Segers himself.
The print market’s expected standards of cleanliness are demonstrated by
contemporary commentary, apart from the lack of messiness in the works of Segers’s
contemporaries. In 1645, Abraham Bosse (1602/4-1676) published the first treatise on
engraving and etching, De la manière de graver à l'eaux-forte et au burin.113 In it he
cautions the artist to be careful not to dirty his plates when etching, and repeatedly
emphasizes the cleanliness required for the process.114 The 1702 edition of the English
translation by William Faithorne warns that getting dust or dirt on the ground will cause
holes and scratches.115 He also writes that “if any kind of greasie matter happen to drop
upon it, your plate will be incurable.”116 Throughout, Faithorne is concerned with
cleanliness, advising the use of aprons, clean towels, clean paper, and the washing of
hands, so as to avoid scratches, streaks, and other unwanted marks.117 While printing, he
advises leaving no plate tone, so that the unmarked areas are as “white as the margins…
to the end that all may come out clear on the Paper.”118 Lastly, he instructs printers to
113 Abraham Bosse, Traicte ́ des manieres de graver en taille douce sur l'airin… (Paris, chez ledit Bosse, en l'Isle du Palais, à la Rozerouge, devant la Megisserie M. DC. XLV, 1645); For more on Bosse, see Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 114 One might look to Bosse’s 1642 prints depicting etching, engraving, and printing shops. Though in The Intaglio Printer, there are two or three scraps of paper on the floor, the shop otherwise orderly and clean. Dry prints are stacked, wet prints are hung up to dry in an orderly fashion, and unprinted paper remains covered and bound in packages under the tables. Unlike one contemporary description of a book printing shop, the printers are hardly “wad[ing] about in filthy paper, swilling wine, and banging their composing sticks…” Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France, 14-15, 20. Figs. 1, 2. 115 Faithorne, The Art of Graving and Etching, 11. 116 Ibid., 31-32. 117 Ibid., 11, 25, 27, 31, 38, 39, 66, 67, 71. 118 Ibid., 67.
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only touch the plate on the sides and back, “that you may not sully it.”119 In a comment
on Rembrandt’s print buying practices, Joachim von Sandrart had heard that Rembrandt
had bid one hundred guilders each for fourteen “of the cleanest impressions” of certain
prints by Lucas van Leyden, thus demonstrating the value of clean – or at least cleanly
printed – prints.120
In her article on Rembrandt’s “messy aesthetic,” Nadine Orenstein notes that the
prints on the market in Holland during the seventeenth century – by both professional and
amateur printmakers – were by and large clean and professional looking. Though
Orenstein discusses this in reference to Rembrandt, whose print production began in the
mid 1620s and continued into the 1660s, her assessment of the Dutch print market applies
to Segers as well. She further argues that Dutch print consumers may have thought
Rembrandt’s works bizarre, since they were accustomed to more “polished” prints.121
The market expectation was for standardized prints, often adhering to certain formats or
genres, which were “cleanly wiped… uniformly printed, and without extraneous
marks.”122 One need only look at one of the many series of landscapes published by Claes
Jansz Visscher – who will be discussed later – with their title plates and standard sizes,
119 Ibid., 67; There are surprisingly few fingerprints in the prints of Segers. For all his messiness, he did seem to take care not to touch the inked plate with his fingers. HB 13IIIu and 27Im are the only two noted by Haverkamp-Begemann. However, a closer examination of every impression (like the close scrutiny frequently afforded to Rembrandt’s prints) would likely yield more faint or partial prints. 120 Paul Crenshaw translates this passage as “fine impressions.” The original German is “…für 14. Stuck von dieses Kunsters saubersten Abdrucken als das Ecce homo…” In this context “saubersten” could be translated to both fine and clean, and in any case, they seem to have been literally synonymous at the time. The idiosyncrasies of dirty and poorly printed works were not valued as they might be today. Alternatively, Luijten translates “saubersten” to “freshest” – an ironic phrase as they would have been over a hundred years old if they were lifetime impressions. Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 96-97, 181; Hinterding et al., Rembrandt, the Printmaker, 11; Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, Nuremberg 1675–1680, Scholarly annotated online edition, ed. by T. Kirchner, A. Nova, C. Blüm, A. Schreurs and T. Wübbena, 2008–2012, S. 240. 121 Ibid., 6. 122 Ibid., 6.
42
usually signed by both printmaker and publisher, and sometimes numbered and labeled
within a series (Figs. 19, 20; for prints from such series, see Figs. 26, 29, 32, 35-37).
Orenstein also notes the rarity, in the early seventeenth century Holland, of prints with
scratches, markings, foul-biting, or traces of plates being reused for different prints.
Segers’s prints are the antithesis of everything that Orenstein notes as typical in Dutch
prints. If Rembrandt’s prints seemed unusual to his audiences, what was made of
Segers’s?
A further study of Segers’s prints reveals messiness in other aspects of his
workshop practice. HB 6IId, for example, is a good legible impression of a fairly normal
looking landscape. However, a closer inspection reveals deposits of an orange-brown
waxy substance on the surface of the paper (Fig. 21). A still closer look makes it clear
that the printed blue ink sits on top of the waxy deposits, and in some cases there is a
small unprinted halo around the mark. This shows that the paper was dirty before Segers
decided to use it to print on. The paper must have been sitting around his studio
collecting dirt or other particles before he printed on it. HB 29h also features a waxy
deposit on its surface (Fig. 22). The perfectly circular shape of the mark indicates that it
was likely a drip of wax or ground that fell on the paper and was subsequently wiped or
scratched away slightly. This all occurred before Segers applied a coat of green body
coloring. Here it is unclear whether Segers printed the plate before or after the wax
dripped on it, as it fell in an unetched area of the sky. It was likely before, however, since
the wax would have likely been extruded when sent through the press. Regardless, it
appears as though Segers had spilled something on his print in a prominent location in the
43
sky, and rather than scraping it off entirely – which could have done easily – he left it
when overpainting the print.
This dirtiness is not relegated to the printed side of his prints. The verso of HB
29h also includes a wax or oil based mark in the bottom right corner (Fig. 23). This was
possibly Segers’s etching ground, a supposition that is supported by the form of the mark.
It stretches across the corner in a diagonal line, with oil stains emanating from it. Within
the marking is a thin ridge, which could correspond to the edge of an etching plate.
Although we cannot assume that this was necessarily Segers’s doing, as it could have
occurred in the studio of another artist after his death, it is likely that it was. The steep
increase in value of Segers’s works after his death make it likely that an informed owner
would have taken precautions when working with them, and the marking is more
consistent with Segers’s messy workshop practice.123
Other examples give signs of similar messiness within Segers’s studio. On the
verso of HB 17IIb are two vertical strips of what appear to be offset from another print or
plate – or perhaps even from the printing felts (Fig. 24). At the top of the left strip is a
form resembling the ship’s rigging on the recto. Though a one to one correlation is
difficult to establish, it is possible that this transfer came from another print also made
from Segers’s cut up print of a ship. The verso of HB 3 also features offset that clearly
reflects one of Segers’s works (Fig. 25). Again, in this strip of offset, the bark of a tree
typical of a number Segers’s works – including the recto of this particular print – appears
next to what might be a line of ink from the edge of the plate. Similarly, HB 6IId has two
123 If this is indeed Segers’s ground, it stands in opposition to Collins’s argument for Adam Elsheimer as Segers’s teacher. Elsheimer was noted to have been using a white ground, and if this print is can be taken as evidence, Segers was not. Collins, Hercules Seghers, 20-21.
44
diagonal strips of brown dots forming a right angle that had transferred – possibly from
the edges of a plate – onto the verso, likely the result of Segers setting the paper on or
under a plate, and the corner edges transferring. The peculiar shapes of the offset ink on
HB 3 and 17IIb reflect pressure applied in specific ways, perhaps the result of setting
books or tools on top of them.124
The workshop practice of Segers might have looked something like this: Segers
picked a plate of copper. Though this may have been a new plate, it also could have been
an old recycled plate which he may have cut up – such as is the case with the large boat –
or he may have used the back of it, a not uncommon practice.125 He then covered the
plate with ground, haphazardly in some areas and without fully cleaning the plate of
grease, so that foul-biting was almost guaranteed. These were areas he was perhaps not
interested in, or in other cases, areas that he was particularly interested in. In some parts
of the composition – usually the skies, though also the margins – he tested his needles or
brushes in different ways, all the while working up the landscape at the same time. When
finished, he selected a piece of paper or cloth – probably lying somewhere around his
studio gathering dust, dirt, and debris – and prepared it for printing. This might have
entailed coloring or staining the surface, or not. Segers sometimes laid pieces of coarse
fabric over his paper when printing, so as to give it the texture of a textile. Once printed,
124 Offset on the backs of prints is rarely addressed, but is a useful tool in establishing chronologies and printing practices. Since the ink had to be somewhat wet in order to transfer, one can tell what other prints were being printed at the same time and, if the print is the same as the verso, that the printer stacked their prints after printing. Hinterding uses offsets on the backs of Rembrandt's prints in just this way. Unlike with Segers’s prints, the offset on the back is almost always the result of Rembrandt stacking his print on top of another impression of the same print. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 49; Woodward studies offsets in Italian maps as a bibliographic tool. David Woodward, "The Evidence of Offsets in Renaissance Italian Maps and Prints", Print Quarterly 8 (Sept 1991): 234-251. 125 Orenstein, “Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked Lettering,” 38, footnote 4.
45
rather than hanging his prints up as was standard in print shops, Segers set them aside to
get still dirtier. In some cases, he might have set it on top of another print or plate, and
then even set something else on top of it, resulting in strips of offset. In one instance, we
find evidence of offset from Segers setting one print directly on top of another still wet
print, both from the same plate and in the same ink.126 This may be the only indication of
Segers printing in a serial manner, but even here, his tendency towards the messy comes
through.
One last important note about the oeuvre of Segers’s prints is that though rare, the
bulk of Segers’s etchings have come down to us consolidated in a few large collections.
This suggests that rather than being dispersed throughout his lifetime, Segers’s prints
were likely sold all at once to a few buyers. The Rijksmuseum, which has the largest
collection of Segers prints in the world – some seventy-five of the 183 impressions –
received forty-three of their Segers prints from Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708).127
Hinloopen was a print collector who, apart from Segers, had little interest in Dutch
works. He was primary a collector of Italian and French prints, but apart from one print
by Rembrandt, two series by Jan van de Velde, and a handful of other Dutch prints,
Hinloopen owned over fifty prints by Segers.128 This unusually large collection of Segers
prints, whose rarity was already commented on by Hoogstraten by the 1670s, indicates 126 On the recto of HB 46c is ink transfer in the same color as the recto, in a formation with a 1:1 correspondence with the image on the recto. Though the transfer is spotty at best, one can see a faint vertical line of dots just left of center that, when reversed and overlaid with the recto, align perfectly with the strong vertical of the right wall. Transferred dots are also more heavily concentrated at the bottom where the foliage is most heavily etched, especially bottom right, where the dots are grouped in formations that echo the foliage. There is more transfer at upper right, and the sky is almost empty. Transfer due to embossment of the paper making those areas transfer is ruled out by the fact that the paper is thick prepared with a relatively thick layer of paint. 127 Hinloopen actually bequeathed forty-eight prints to the city of Amsterdam, but five were lost in the multiple moves between various archives before the Rijksmuseum received them. Boon, "Een notitie," 7. 128 HB, Hercules Segers, 3.
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that Hinloopen probably obtained the majority of them in a large group from someone
close to the artist.129 Jan van der Waals, in his book on the print collection of Michiel
Hinloopen argues that due to the lack of doubles in the collection, as well as differences
in varnishing and backing of the prints – which were probably applied after they left
Segers’s possession – Hinloopen could not have received the entirety of the collection
from the same source, as Boon and Haverkamp-Begemann had supposed.130 True as that
may be, the sheer size of the collection, coupled with the fact that Segers prints were
already considered extremely rare at this point, indicate that the bulk of his Segers
collection likely came from a single source – probably someone close to the artist.
Connections are easy to find. Hinloopen’s cousin was Jacob Jacobsz Hinloopen (1621-
1679), who was an art collector along with his brother Jan.131 Both Jacob and Jan bought
paintings from Rembrandt, and the former was involved as a commissioner for the
Desolate Boedelskamer (Chamber of Insolvent Estates) in the division of Rembrandt’s
assets when he filed for bankruptcy in 1656.132 One wonders whether Jacob had received
the prints from Rembrandt, or had provided a channel through which Michiel might have
obtained some. Rembrandt, in turn, likely obtained the prints through the Amsterdam art
dealer Johannes de Renialme, a Rembrandt collector who also had the largest collection
129 Haverkamp-Begemann offers David Vinckboons as a possibility. HB, Hercules Segers, 23; Brauksiepe concludes that Segers must have known Vinckboons, Gillis d’Hondecoeter, and Joos Goemare from his time in Coninxloo’s workshop. Bernd Brauksiepe, “Von A = Alsloot bis Z = Zapponi: das künstlerische Erbe des Gillis van Coninxloo; eine Spurensuche” in Kunst, Kommerz, Glaubenskampf : Frankenthal um 1600, ed. Edgar J. Hürkey (Worms : Werner, 1995), 125. 130 Jan van der Waals, De Prentschat Van Michiel Hinloopen: een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland ('s-Gravenhage: SDU Uitgeverij, 1988), 33; HB, Hercules Segers, 3, 23. 131 There were at least three generations of Jacob Jacobz Hinloopens. 132 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 76.
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of works by Segers on record (in the 1640 and 1657 inventories).133 Or perhaps Michiel
could have been in direct contact with Renialme, bypassing Jacob and Rembrandt
altogether. Regardless, there are a number of ways that a group of Segers prints could
have ended up in Hinloopen’s collection, coming from the estate of the artist and perhaps
added to along the way.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century collections, such as those of Pieter Cornelis
Baron van Leyden (1717-1788) and John Sheepshanks (1787-1863), were assembled
mostly piecemeal from various print dealers and collectors like Jacob Houbraken (1698-
1780).134 The Dresden Kupferstichkabinet’s fifteen Segers prints, along with six from the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and a few scattered others, all come from the collection
of Jacob Houbraken (1698-1780).135 Houbraken probably received some prints from his
father Arnold Houbraken and Arnold, in turn, may have received his prints from his
teacher Samuel van Hoogstraten, who from his biography of Segers seems to have been
familiar with many of the prints. It is in turn possible that Hoogstraten got his Segers
prints from his teacher Rembrandt. Though even if the actual prints were not passed
down in such a manner, at least the interest in the work of Segers seems to have been.
133 Renialme is the obvious choice for a connection between Rembrandt and Segers. If not Renialme, Hendrick van Uylenburgh is also a possibility. Hendrick was an art dealer and early patron of Rembrandt, and Rembrandt lived and worked with Uylenburgh in the 1630s. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 92; Further support for a connection between Segers and Uylenburgh is the fact that both men were Mennonites living in the same city. Paul Crenshaw, “Did Rembrandt Travel to England,” in In His Milieu Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias, ed. Amy Golahny et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 128; It is believed that Hendrick introduced the young artist to his niece Saskia, whom he would marry. Hendrick’s son Gerrit van Uylenburgh – Saskia’s cousin – was also an art dealer, and owned three of Segers’s paintings, noted in an insolvency inventory of 1675. Montias Database INVNO 1357, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=3768 134 HB, Hercules Segers, 23. 135 HB, Hercules Segers, 23.
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Haverkamp-Begemann and Boon examined the provenance of the prints in the
1973 monograph, and astutely noted their early consolidation in a few collections.
However, since the trail of documents does not go back as far as Segers, their analysis
only goes as far back as Houbraken and Hoogstraten. They did not note the significance
of the lack of any information regarding the circulation of his prints until a few decades
after his death. Segers’s prints do not show up in inventories or auctions until the second
half of the seventeenth century, and none is noted in any inventory prior to his death. The
first known transaction of Segers’s prints occurs in 1667 when a number of the prints
were included in a large purchase by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) on behalf of
Louis XIV (1638-1715) from Michel de Marolles (1600-1681).136 The lack of visible
circulation of his prints points again to the hypothesis that Segers was not circulating
prints during his lifetime.
136 HB 22IIh, 27IIIs, 31d, and 46d or 46e.
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Chapter 4
SEGERS’S CONTEMPORARIES AND THE AMSTERDAM AND HAARLEM PRINT MARKETS
Segers’s prints, strange as they are, were not created in a vacuum. As much as
Werner Herzog might want to claim that Segers was “four-hundred years ahead of [his]
time,” the truth is that Segers was also very much of his time. The first quarter of the
seventeenth century saw the rise of the landscape genre, and the proliferation of etching
as the chosen print medium for painter-printmakers.137 Unlike engraving which required
years of training to master, etching could be learned rather quickly, and the process was
much more akin to drawing than engraving. Whereas the engraving burin was held in the
palm and pushed through the plate using the whole arm, the stylus could be held like a
brush or quill pen, and the movements could be much more fluid. Thus, rather than
having their designs engraved by professional printmakers, etching allowed painters to
137 Landscape as an independent genre was largely a conception of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The popularity of landscapes continued to grow throughout the seventeenth century. In Amsterdam inventories from 1620-1629, History subjects made up 46.9% of paintings, whereas Landscape, Still Life, Genre, and Portrait subjects all together accounted for 46%. By the 1660s, Landscape made up 33.2% of paintings, and History paintings had dwindled to 14.2%. Similar trends are seen in Delft inventories, with History going from 44.5% to 26.3% and Landscape from 23.7% to 38.6%. Michael North, "Auctions and the Emergence of an Art Market in Eighteenth-Century Germany," in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450-1750, ed. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. van Miegroet (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 291.
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take up the needles themselves.138 The freedom accorded by the etching medium led
countless artists to create their own prints in a sketch-like style that was explored by
Segers, and later fully exploited by Rembrandt. Esaias van de Velde, Jan van de Velde II,
Willem Buytewech, and others who took to etching serve as contemporary printmakers
with whom Segers can – to some extent – be grouped.
The print community in Haarlem and Amsterdam was flourishing around the time
Segers was working there; along with the group of twenty-somethings developing a
market for etchings were also young publishers like Claes Jansz Visscher (1586-1652) in
Amsterdam and Jan Pietersz Berendrecht (1590-1645) in Haarlem.139 The interactions
amongst these artists and publishers are observable in collaborations, adaptations, and
other relations. Haverkamp-Begemann stated that Esaias and Jan van de Velde, Willem
Buytewech, Cornelis van Wieringen, and Segers must have all known each other,
elaborating that Berendrecht and Visscher further facilitated interaction.140 The fact that
Segers joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke the same year as Esaias and Buytewech
makes a connection all the more likely. However, although it is possible – or even
probable – that Segers knew Buytewech and Esaias, this does not necessitate his having
shared his prints with them. Even if Segers had known them, his approach to print
creation and distribution was completely different from those in his milieu. An
examination of the flourishing print community around Segers is useful because it
highlight his absence from their interactions, and supports the argument that his prints
138 Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, xxi. 139 Catherine Levesque, Journey Through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 35-36 140 HB, Hercules Segers, 22.
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were not seen by his peers. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that Segers was at the
same time both a part of and apart from his contemporaries.
Esaias van de Velde was born a few years before Segers in 1587 to a protestant
family newly relocated to Amsterdam. As with Segers, his family was fleeing the
persecution of Protestants in Antwerp and the Southern Netherlands.141 His father Hans
van de Velde was – amongst others in their family – a painter and art dealer, and likely
trained Esaias himself for at least part of his education.142 In 1606, Hans and Jan Bassé,
another painter originally from the South, appraised a painting for the leather merchant
Ambrosius Kemp, also an immigrant to Amsterdam from the contested city of ‘s-
Hertogenbosch.143 The amount of contact and intermingling amongst Protestant
immigrants who had come to Amsterdam in the last quarter of the sixteenth century is
obvious from this single interaction, and indicates a strong community of these new
arrivals. Consequently, it is possible that Segers’s and Esaias’s parents could have known
each other. This is made all the more likely by the fact that Pieter and Hercules Segers
and Hans and possibly even Esaias van de Velde were all present at the auction of Gillis
van Coninxloo’s estate in March of 1607.144 The sale was a bit of a ‘who’s who’ of
141 Though, unlike Segers, the Van de Veldes were not Mennonite, and so Esaias was baptized in May of 1587. George S. Keyes and J. G. C. A. Briels, Esaias Van Den Velde, 1587-1630 (Doornspijk, the Netherlands: Davaco, 1984), 21. 142 Hans’s brother was painter Anthony van de Velde I, and their uncle was Hans van de Velde de Oude, whose grandson was painter Jan van de Velde II. For a detailed family tree, see Keyes, Esaias van den Velde, 18-19; Hans’s son in law was painter Jacob Martens. Montias Database, Inv#.Lot 733.0057, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord2.php?-action=browse&-recid=1916 143 Keyes, Esaias van den Velde, 21. Also, Montias Database, Inv#. Lot 929.0016, http://research.frick.org/montias/browserecord2.php?-action=browse&-recid=2113 144 Keyes, Esaias van den Velde, 21; Hercules and Pieter Segers presence at the auction is noted in HB, Hecules Segers, 17; The inventory from the auction is published in its entirety in Briels, De Zuidnederlandse, 235-244. Frans Pietersz de Grebber was also present. He was the father of Pieter Fransz de Grebber, who is noted by Collins as another etcher working in Haarlem, though at this auction he would have been only seven, and twelve when Segers joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke.
52
Haarlem and Amsterdam artists; amongst the buyers were David Vinckboons, Frans
Pietersz de Grebber, Barend van Someren, and Rembrandt’s future teacher Pieter
Lastman, as well as Adriaen van Nieulandt, mentioned earlier.145 It has been postulated
by a number of scholars that Esaias, after an initial apprenticeship with his father, would
have then studied under Coninxloo, another protestant immigrant from Antwerp.146 It has
also been proposed on the basis of style that he studied under David Vinckboons rather
than Coninxloo, although it is possible he studied under both.147 In 1609, Esaias’s father
died and he moved to Haarlem where in 1612 he joined the Guild of St. Luke.148 Around
this time Esaias’s second cousin Jan van de Velde II (1593-1641), also an etcher of
landscapes, came to Haarlem and joined the St. Luke’s Guild in 1614.149 By 1618, Esaias
had moved to The Hague and Jan had left for Enkhuizen.150 He died in 1630 in The
Hague, shortly before Segers had settled there. Jan returned to Haarlem in the 1620s, but
was soon back in Enkhuizen where he died in 1641.151
145 Their presence is noted in Briels, De Zuidnederlandse, 235-244. The list of buyers is almost largely comprised of artists and art dealers. 146 Keyes, Esaias van de Velde, 22; Coninxloo was a “revolutionary who had been among the defenders of Antwerp against the troops of Parma.” Collins, Hercules Seghers, 9. 147 Keyes, Esaias van de Velde, 22; De Groot names Vinckboons as his teacher. Irene de Groot, Landscape Etchings by the Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century (London: G. Fraser, 1979), fig. 54; Sutton posits that he studied with both. Indeed, it is very possible that he studied under Coninxloo until his death in 1609, and then Vinckboons thereafter. Peter C. Sutton and Albert Blankert, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 497. 148 Keyes, Esaias van de Velde, 24. 149 Houbraken erroneously called Jan and Esaias van de Velde brothers rather than cousins, and also ascribed a false fraternal relationship with the unrelated Willem van de Velde II. Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (B.M. Israël Amsterdam, 1976), 275; Others have repeated the mistaken relationship with Jan, such as Laurence Binyon, Dutch etchers of the seventeenth century (London: Seeley and Co., 1895), 41; Though a number of sources have called him Esaias’s cousin, according to Keyes family tree, he is technically a second cousin. Keyes, Esaias van de Velde, 17-18. 150 Keyes, Esaias van de Velde, 24; RKD, “Velde, Jan van de (II).” 151 RKD, “Velde, Jan van de (II).”
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Another of Van de Velde and Segers’s contemporaries was Willem Buytewech.
He was born in 1591 or 1592 in Rotterdam, then a smaller city without much of an art
community.152 In 1612, as mentioned, he joined the painter’s Guild of St. Luke. Along
with Segers and Van de Velde, he was a recent transplant, and like the others, he would
leave Haarlem after a relatively short period of time. He married in Haarlem in 1613, but
had left for Rotterdam around 1617, where he died in 1624.153 By his hand, thirty-two
prints are known, all thought to be made between 1612 and 1617, whilst he was living in
Haarlem. He apparently gave up etching for painting when he moved to Rotterdam in
1617, though he did execute designs that would be etched by Jan van de Velde II, among
others.154 Reconstructed chronologies have also largely relegated Segers’s print
production to his time in Amsterdam and Haarlem.
Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (1575/7–1633) was of an older generation, but
was another landscape painter and print designer working in Haarlem at the same time,
and running in some of the same circles.155 Willem van Nieulandt – a few years older
than Segers – was etching landscapes in Amsterdam during the first few years of the
century, but he had left for Antwerp – the other print center of the North – by 1606.156
Regardless, his etchings were no doubt an influence on the others, and as mentioned,
Segers copied his ruins in two of his own prints (Figs. 8, 9).157
152 Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Willem Buytewech (Amsterdam: H. Hertzberger, 1959), 3. 153 Haverkamp-Begemann, Willem Buytewech, 3-5. 154 Ger Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1993), 303. 155 RKD, “Wieringen, Cornelis Claesz. van.” 156 RKD, “Nieulandt, Willem van (II).” 157 HB 42 and 43 find their source in Willem van Nieulandt’s Roman Ruins (Hollstein 22, see the British Museum’s S.5276)
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Claes Jansz Visscher, the preeminent print publisher of the first half of the
seventeenth century, was born two or three years before Segers in 1587 in Amsterdam, to
Jan Claesz Visscher, a shipbuilder.158 Though known mostly for his work as a publisher,
he began his career as an etcher decorating maps under the direction of Willem Jansz
Blaeu in Amsterdam in 1605.159 By 1607 he was making drawings and etchings of
landscapes, and he also attended the auction of Coninxloo’s estate that year.160 In May of
1611 he opened a shop on the Kalverstraat, which at the time was the center for print,
book, and map publishing in Amsterdam (as well as where Segers’s first wife had lived
for thirteen years).161 Visscher continued to etch his own plates, but the large majority of
his stock would come from others working within his shop, or from second-hand plates
acquired elsewhere. He zealously collected plates, beginning in 1610 with a large
purchase from Willem Jansz Claesz’s stock.162 Altogether, Visscher’s stock of plates
would come to include approximately one thousand made by his own shop, and another
thousand second-hand plates.163
Perhaps because of his background in map decoration, and the city views he made
in service of it, Visscher took a particular delight in landscapes.164 Some of his early
drawings (1607-1608) are faithful depictions of the Dutch landscape, and around 1612 he
158 De Groot, Landscape Etchings by the Dutch Masters, 22, 37; Possibly 1586 according to Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 323. 159 Orenstein, Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic: Novelty and the Print Publisher (Durham: Duke U.P, 1998), 153; Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 190-191. 160 His purchases are listed as various works (“Verscheyden cunsten”), various drawings (“Verscheyden teyckeningen”), a Coninxloo drawing (“1 uts.” referring back to “teeckeningen van Coninckslo”), various prints (“Uts.” referring back to “Verscheyden printen”), and a piece signed by Dürer (“1 stuck by Albert Duyr geteckent”). Briels, De Zuidnederlandse, 238-241. 161 Orenstein, Marketing Prints, 146, 153. Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 191. 162 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 192. 163 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 189. 164 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 192-193.
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published Pleasant Places, a series of his own etchings of views around Haarlem (Figs.
19, 26). His interest in landscapes colored his publishing practices as well, producing
more landscape prints than any other publisher and distributing them throughout all of
Europe.165 From 1612 to 1630 he published many landscapes and city views, and actively
acquired more. He worked on a number of occasions with Jan van de Velde II. Though
Jan was a publisher himself, Visscher published a series of eighteen landscapes by him in
1615, and another series of etchings of the seasons in 1617. After Van de Velde’s death
in 1641, Visscher purchased from his estate a series of thirty-five landscapes, which he
then published after his workshop made changes and added a title page.166 In 1613
Visscher executed and published a series of fourteen landscapes after designs by
Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen.167 Although there is no indication that Visscher ever
worked directly with the landscape (and genre) etcher Willem Buytewech, his interest in
Buytewech’s prints is clear in a few instances. In 1621 Visscher published a series of
landscape etchings by Buytewech previously published by Broer Jansz in 1616 and later
in the 1620s he bought fourteen prints after Buytewech from Jan van de Velde II.168
These instances show that even when Visscher was not working directly with a
particular landscape etcher, he would acquire the work of those he admired. When he
found it difficult to acquire the plates of artists whose work he wanted to publish, he
devised other means by which to do so. Though he admired the etchings of Esaias van de
Velde, since 1614 Esaias had been in an agreement with Jan Pietersz Berendrecht as his
165 Orenstein, Marketing Prints, 153-154. 166 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 193-194. 167 See Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 92, figs 88-101. 168 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 194.
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regular publisher.169 Despite this obstacle, Visscher had his shop produce copies of
Esaias’s prints soon after they were published, and was likely able to sell them for similar
prices to the originals.170 Similarly, he bought Esaias’s drawings and had his shop make
prints after them.171 Eventually Visscher did get a hold of some of Esaias’s plates, but
only after others had published them.172 In 1615, Visscher published Esaias’s etching of a
huntsman as part of a series including prints by Wttenbrouck and Buytewech, as well as a
few of his own.173 Thus, the careers of Visscher, Buytewech, and the Van de Veldes were
closely related within the print market of Haarlem and Amsterdam around 1610 to 1620.
However, in the context of Haarlem and Amsterdam printmakers and publishers,
Segers name is all but absent in the scholarship. In Catherine Levesque’s book tracing the
development of landscape prints in early seventeenth-century Haarlem, with chapters
dedicated to Bruegel, Visscher, Buytewech, Esaias van de Velde, and Jan van de Velde,
Segers’s name is not even mentioned once. One wonders how such an omission could
happen. But then again, Segers – as a printmaker – does seem entirely absent from this
discourse. While Jan van de Velde was clearly influenced by the other painter-
printmakers discussed by Levesque, we see no mark of Segers’s influence.174 In
Innovation and popularization: Printmaking and print publishing in Haarlem during the
1620s, Elizabeth Ann Wyckoff introduces Segers alongside Buytewech and the Van de
169 Orenstein, Marketing Prints, 154. 170 Orenstein, Marketing Prints, 154; Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 194. 171 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 194. 172 See Hollstein 3 and Hollstein 5. A second copy of the latter was also made and published by Visscher, inscribed “Esaijas van den Velde inven: CI Visscher Excudebat”. Hollstein's Dutch & Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts ca. 1450 - 1700 XXXII P. Valck - E. van de Velde, 247. 173 Hollstein 6. F W H Hollstein; Ger Luijten; D de Hoop Scheffer, Hollstein's Dutch & Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts ca. 1450 - 1700 XXXII P. Valck - E. van de Velde (Rosendaal : Koninklijke Van Pool, 1988), 248. 174 Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 90.
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Veldes as young etchers all working in the same place at the same time.175 However, in
the bulk of her text Segers is all but ignored, whereas Buytewech and the Van de Veldes
show up again and again, working with a publisher or having their designs copied. These
are not faults of these authors; Segers really was absent from the print culture of Haarlem
and Amsterdam. This in and of itself is extremely significant. How did Segers avoid
being completely integrated into the print culture around him? The truth is that while
Segers did join the St. Luke’s Guild with Buytewech and Esaias, their knowledge of his
work may have been relegated to his paintings. Besides Segers joining the guild with two
other painter-etchers, there is no indication of Segers’s presence in the Haarlem and
Amsterdam print scene. The implication is again that Segers’s print production was a
private endeavor. They were almost certainly not distributed, and it is quite possible that
his peers were entirely unaware of his printing activities.
I have focused on the practice of artists and publishers such as Visscher,
Buytewech, and the Van de Veldes because they were all working in Haarlem at around
the same time as Segers, etching landscapes and publishing their work through
conventional avenues.176 Jan van de Velde II was active as an etcher and a publisher,
while also having his plates and designs printed by Visscher.177 Buytewech and the Van
de Veldes were having their work printed by various publishers including Claes Jansz
Visscher, Broer Jansz, Hendrik Hondius, and Jan Berendrecht. Segers, on the other hand,
was not taking advantage of these avenues. Despite this, it is almost taken for granted by
175 Elizabeth Ann Wyckoff, Innovation and Popularization: Printmaking and Print Publishing in Haarlem During the 1620s (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1998), 33, 36, 53. 176 Though Jan van de Velde II likely arrived slightly later, as he was a few years younger than Segers and Esaias, and did not join the St. Luke’s guild until 1614, two years after Segers and Esaias. 177 Luijten et al, Dawn of the Golden Age, 191-192.
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some that Segers knew and interacted with the other Haarlem landscape etchers (and
painters) and that they influenced each other. Leo Collins went as far as to posit that
Segers taught the art of etching to the other two, a dubious supposition.178 Though Segers
worked in the same city at the same time as Buytewech and Esaias van de Velde, and
though they all etched landscapes and joined St. Luke’s guild in the same year (along
with Jan van de Velde two years later), Segers’s mode of production and lack of
dissemination could not have been more different from his contemporaries.
It is significant that there is no indication that Visscher – or any other publisher,
for that matter – had made any attempt to purchase, publish, or copy any of the works of
Segers. While Visscher actively sought out plates by Buytewech and the Van de Veldes,
and while he made efforts to copy their designs or their drawings, he made no effort to
secure plates by Segers, or to even copy a composition. There are a number of
possibilities that would explain why Visscher made no visible attempt to acquire his
etchings or reproduce them in any form, or more broadly, why not a single contemporary
publisher seems to have seized on the opportunity. The first possibility is that there was
simply no demand for Segers’s works. However, a number of Segers’s prints come quite
close stylistically to the works of his contemporary Haarlem landscape etchers, as well as
to older printmakers whose plates were still being printed, such as Goltzius. The
mountainous terrains of HB 14Ia and HB 29 (Figs. 27, 28) are reminiscent of Pieter
Bruegel’s Large Landscapes (Fig. 29), works by Albrecht Altdorfer, or even some of the
chiaroscuro woodcut landscapes produced by Goltzius just before the end of the century,
178 Collins, Hercules Seghers, 18, 21.
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though the fantastical has been somewhat restrained in Segers’s prints;179 HB 37 (Fig. 30)
recalls Coninxloo’s painted forest landscapes (Fig. 31), or perhaps the forest etchings of
Buytewech or Visscher (Figs. 32, 26);180 HB 30 (Fig. 33) and 31 resemble Goltzius’s
drawings of the Haarlem countryside (Fig. 34) or perhaps one of Jan van de Velde’s
Eight Landscapes (Fig. 35);181 HB 44b (and to some extent HB 38) looks right at home
alongside Buytewech’s series of landscapes published by Visscher in 1621 (Figs. 18, 36),
Willem van Nieulandt’s views of ruins, or Esaias van de Velde’s landscapes published
throughout the 1610s and 1620s by Visscher, Hondius, and Berendrecht (Figs. 8, 37).
In such prints as those listed above, there must have been some element that
would have been adaptable for the markets by such savvy a publisher as Visscher. One
could say that the messiness of the prints deterred publishers, but then why did they not
copy any of Segers’s compositions? In any case, there are prints by Segers where the
plate appears to be rather clean and if simply printed in black on white paper, would be
entirely legible and marketable. The examples cited above number among them. Another
argument might be made that Segers’s fantastical landscapes might have seemed old-
fashioned at this point, but the fact that prints from Bruegel and others’ designs were still
being reissued shows that there was a taste for those types of landscapes; this apart from
the fact that Segers’s approach to the landscape varies enough to where some might be
old-fashioned whereas others were ahead of their time.182 In point of fact, Segers’s
179 For Bruegel’s Large Landscapes, see Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, figs. 11-22. 180 For Buytewech’s etchings, see Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, figs. 75-80. 181 For Goltzius’s drawings, see Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1966), figs 52-54; For Jan van de Velde’s Eight Landscapes, see Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, fig. 87. 182 One might also draw attention to other landscape printers that came before such as Lautensack (some prints on colored paper), Hirschvogel, and Altdorfer (sometimes hand-colored, possibly by the artist).
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approach to wide flat vistas would be taken up by the likes of Rembrandt, Ruyscher,
Ruisdael, and others in the decades to come. All of the evidence points to the more likely
fact that Segers’s prints were never published, distributed, bought, sold, or copied by
Visscher or any of his publishing contemporaries because the prints never saw the light of
day, or rather, they never left his studio.
This assertion is supported by one final fact. There is no work that shows the clear
influence of Segers’s etchings until nearly two decades after his death. N.I. Romanov
claims that in 1632 Jan van Goyen based his Landscape with Oaks (Fig. 38) on Segers's
Old Oak Tree and Distant View (HB 28, Fig. 39).183 The assertion is repeated by
Haverkamp-Begemann as the only instance of an artist being influenced by Segers during
his lifetime.184 However, after looking at Van Goyen's painting, one must admit that the
similarities are superficial, and far from definitive proof of Van Goyen having seen the
print. Haverkamp-Begemann’s description is accurate: “As in Segers' etching, Van
Goyen put large, old, weatherbeaten trees in the foreground with a few men next to them,
and spread a far flat landscape with some hills beyond them.”185 This vague similarity
can hardly be taken as evidence for Van Goyen’s direct knowledge of the print. In any
case, it is possible that Segers had made paintings with similar compositions – indeed,
aspects of his prints are replicated in the few surviving paintings (HB 4, 6, 14, 31, 34, 41)
David Landau and Peter W. Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 345-346. 183 N.I. Romanov, “A Landscape with Oaks by Jan van Goyen,” Oud-Holland LIII, (1936). 184 Except for two possible instances of Rembrandt being influenced by Segers’s prints, but these happened during the period between 1633-1638, at which point Segers may have already been dead. Regardless, the assertions are based on stylistic choices rather than clear borrowings. He further notes that Segers’s impact was not truly realized until at least the 1640s and 1650s. HB, Hercules Segers, 57, 60. 185 HB, Hercules Segers, 57.
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– and that Van Goyen saw or owned one of these paintings, which he may have used as
model.
Albrecht Altdorfer’s landscape etchings of c.1521-1522 are a useful foil. They
are comparable in size, subject, and medium to Segers’s prints, though unlike his they are
a cohesive series of nine (plus one by Altdorfer’s brother Erhard). Christopher Wood
convincingly argues that Altdorfer likely printed them in “no more than a few dozen
impressions… then gave them or sold them individually rather than putting them on an
open market.”186 The small print runs, low survival, and absence from the open market
directly parallel Segers’s prints. However, even their severely limited distribution was
registered soon after their printing. Copies after and borrowings from their compositions
can be seen in no less than five instances by 1523, less than two years after the limited
distribution from Altdorfer’s shop.187
There is no such impact from the prints of Segers until well after his death, and
there exists no evidence that anyone had even seen his prints during his lifetime. This is
not to say that no one did, but the number of people to have seen them was few enough to
where they made no impact whatsoever on the market. Surely, had Segers been printing,
selling, and distributing his prints – even in modest editions comparable to those of
Altdorfer a century before – someone would have taken note. Let us return again to HB
37, the so-called Country Road with Trees and Buildings (Fig. 30) – a print that survives
in only one impression. The print is one of Segers most legible, to be sure, but next to
Buytewech’s forest landscapes (Fig. 32), Segers’s print is atmospheric and lifelike
186 Wood, Altdorfer, 260. 187 Wood, Altdorfer, 260.
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whereas Buytewech’s appears simple and flat. Had a publisher – any publisher – seen
Segers’s forest landscape, they would have been taken aback by the tonal qualities
achieved. Would Visscher have not jumped at the opportunity to acquire such a plate?
Would he have not attempted to recreate the tones and the atmosphere? Compared to
Buytewech’s forest landscapes, the difference is night and day. We are once more left
with the conclusion that Segers did not distribute his prints; rather, they remained in his
studio during his lifetime, and were divided once he died.
Thus, we are left to deal with the fact that Segers was almost exclusively etching
landscapes, a newly popular subject in a newly popular medium – no doubt a market-
friendly combination.188 So why – if not for the markets – did Segers choose the subjects
he did, and what are the implications of the printed medium with regards to them? I
would be disingenuous if I did not state my hesitance to address the issue, for fear of
stepping into the territory of psychobiography or conjecture on his mental state – a
familiar trap for Segers scholars. However, the question does require some attention, and
it would be remiss to ignore it.
Svetlana Alpers addresses the impetus behind Dutch landscape painting in her
chapter on mapping in The Art of Describing. Mapping and landscape painting in the
Dutch Golden Age were linked by the concept of descriptio, a term commonly applied to
the act of mapping, which was considered a profession of “world describers.”189 Alpers
characterizes painting in relation to the concept of descriptio as follows:
188 In addition to landscape, Segers treated a few religious or genre subjects, did two etchings that we might call still life, etched a few boats and seascapes, and made one town view from his window. 189 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 122.
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The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about the world… Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.190
Segers’s landscapes might be thought of in this way. The concept of capturing an image
on a surface is all the more relevant in the realm of printmaking. Segers was literally
sculpting the surfaces of his plates. Unlike his contemporaries who would engrave or etch
lines, Segers prints are uncharacteristically three dimensional in their etching. The
textures attained by Segers reflect the concept of descriptio in that they contour the
craggy rocks, the dried and cracking dirt, the thorny vines, and occasionally the rough but
soft texture of hanging moss. Indeed, the ink sits thickly – almost sculpturally – on many
of his prints (Figs. 40, 41). Texture was obviously important to Segers, as he often
counterproofed his prints on canvas. In one instance the ‘matrix’ print survives, and
perhaps gives insight into the reason for Segers’s frequent practice of counterproofing on
fabric; the result not only doubled the print in reverse but also embossed the original print
so that it also had a canvas texture as well.191 Blind embossing is used not infrequently in
modern prints and was occasionally used in Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, but it was
practically unheard of in Segers’s time.192
190 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 122. 191 HB 13IIIp. There is a possibility that the paper was embossed before printing, as in the upper left some of the ink seems to have been affected by the texture. Other particles that were on the paper before printing (known because of white haloes around them), and particles that caused streaks (noticeable most at top right) – possibly during counterproofing or possibly during printing if they were there prior – make it unclear whether the paper was embossed before or after printing. Ad Stijnman states that there is another example in an HB 14IIIp, but this is likely the result of a repeated typo, as Haverkamp-Begemann only catalogues two states in one impression each (HB 14Ia and 14IIb; HB 13 and 27 are the only print that survive in enough impressions to reach ‘p’). See Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 322 (note 603). 192 These were the higher end ‘Surimono’ prints, which incorporated blind embossing, as well as the mica technique and the hidden technique. Richard Louis Edmonds, et al. "Japan, §IX: Prints and books," Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 11, 2013, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T043440pg15; See also Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 322.
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Returning to the idea of texture and descriptio, Segers’s prints describe in the
most unusual ways. Looking at one of the few non-landscape subjects helps to understand
the method by which Segers’s described his world. In his Skull (HB 53, Fig. 42), Segers
employed the same sort of mark making that he used to describe the rocks of his
landscapes. His marks were built up layer by layer, squiggly scraggily marks that are best
described in onomatopoetic terms. They are labored and almost meditative, far from the
quick swooping lines of Rembrandt. But why represent a skull like this? It raises
questions about what the limits of representation are, and perhaps more profoundly –
what we are made of. In a recent article, Christopher P. Heuer posits an explanation:
Segers here materializes the reality not of a secularized art, but of an art differently enchanted, newly medievalized: a momentless, intractable, sedimentary world wherein humans are no more important than boulders, stumps, or dust. A world where, when etched, a human skull appears as what it is, in my time as well as his: a hulk of clotted matter, no different from the mouldering crusts of earthly landscape.193
There is nothing particularly naturalistic in the shading of Segers’s skull; the cavities of
the eye sockets are no darker than the craggy surfaces of the frontal and temporal bones,
and the tones and lines are similar all over. There is no rendering of shadow or even
volume, within or outside of the skull. Rather, Segers represents the textural information
of the skull, and perhaps even its material associations.
Alpers also relates landscapes and mapping in their approaches to the world, what
Alpers calls “the notion of what it is to draw.”194 Whereas the Italian approach to drawing
(disegno) was conceptually intertwined with the intellectual idea, Dutch approaches were
193 Heuer’s own emphasis. Heuer, “Entropic Segers,” 955. 194 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 142. For more on the “Phenomenology of Drawing” see David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. pages 1-4.
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more observational and related to the fields of natural history, geography, astronomy, and
medicine.195 Perhaps this is why Segers’s Two Trees (Fig. 43), Skull, and The Mossy Tree
(HB 33, 53, and 32 respectively) resemble scientific or botanical drawings, devoid of
background and in the case of the trees, shown flattened from a perpendicular viewpoint.
In the Dutch mindset, maps and landscapes were inextricably related, evidenced by the
city views adorning the periphery of countless Dutch maps. Many maps also occupied a
space somewhere between naturalistic and schematic – or between topographic and
chorographic – by showing a view of a city from an oblique perspective, so that it was
neither the profile view of a city, nor the projection from directly above that we have
become accustomed to in maps. The line is further blurred when we remember that many
print publishers, such as Visscher, were also map publishers. Thus the line between
landscapes and maps becomes even more fickle in the printed medium. Visscher, after
all, made his leap to landscape etchings and publishing only after decorating maps under
Willem Blaeu.
But there is another layer to Segers’s prints: the materiality. One must always
keep in mind the metal plate, which Segers was sculpting into a surface, into which he
would put inks made from ground-up rocks and charred vines and bones. There is quite
literally dirt in his ink but also on his prints. Everything about Segers’s process engages
the material and relates to the landscapes he etched. The surfaces of the mountains are
etched with cracks and breaks that are literally etched into the plate, and the mountain
and the plate become one and the same. This sort of conflation works best in Segers’s
prints of rocky landscapes, and is most puzzling when applied to living flesh, such as his
195 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 142.
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Rearing Horse, HB 52. And perhaps it was for this reason that Segers mostly etched
landscapes. It was possibly not market considerations that led Segers to the subject of
landscape (although his market-conscious contemporaries certainly influenced him), but
rather because the medium of the etched copper plate and the nature of Segers’s mark
dictated it.
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Chapter 5
REMBRANDT AND SEGERS
Much has been made of connections between Segers and Rembrandt. For a
number of reasons, the two have been placed side by side in the history of art. The
printmaker and chemist Stanley William Hayter grouped the two together – along with
Callot, Piranesi, and William Blake – as “freaks in their different generations” and as
“forerunners” of modern revivals of printmaking.196 Landau and Parshall conclude The
Renaissance Print by relating the two artists as revolutionaries of printmaking, in that
they both sought “to subvert [the print’s] mechanical advantage in the name of art.”197
The Book of Fine Prints tells us how Segers’s name is coupled “not in equality but in
kinship – with that of Rembrandt.”198 In The Bite of the Print’s preface to a section on
Rembrandt, Segers is evoked as a predecessor both in art practice and in biographical
topos: “Among the few purchasers of his prints, apparently, was a young Amsterdam
196 Stanley William Hayter, New Ways of Gravure (London: Oxford U.P., 1966), 200-201. 197 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 368. 198 Carl Zigrosser, The Book of Fine Prints; An Anthology of Printed Pictures and Introduction to the Study of Graphic Art in the West and the East (New York: Crown Publishers, 1956), 85.
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artist destined to create the finest etchings ever made, and to die, like Seghers, a complete
financial failure. His name was Rembrandt van Rijn.”199
The comparisons are not for naught. Rembrandt and Segers do have much in
common. Their similar approaches to etching and printing will be discussed in this
chapter. However, despite the oft-noted kinship between the two artists, they were also
substantially different. Rembrandt was a savvy self-promoter. By virtue of the print
medium, Rembrandt spread his fame throughout Europe, and consciously created a
demand for his prints and drawings. It was this kind of clever marketing that perhaps led
to an eighteenth-century anecdote that Rembrandt had faked his own death so that his
wife (or mistress) could sell his paintings at a considerably higher price, only for him to
resurface alive and well after some time had passed.200 Regardless, the ways in which
Rembrandt took advantage of the market and demand will be discussed in this chapter.
They serve to contrast with Segers’s own practices, which, had he truly intended his
prints to be profitable, would have been considerably different.
Though it is known that Rembrandt owned at least eight of Segers’s paintings,
K.G. Boon notes that Segers’s name is not included in the section on prints and drawings
from the inventory of Rembrandt’s estate. Boon concludes that Rembrandt’s knowledge
of Segers was “limited largely to the paintings.”201 However, a number of reasons could
account for their absence in the inventory of 1656. First, Rembrandt may have sold his
Segers prints prior to his insolvency. It is also possible that he was keeping them 199 Frank Getlein and Dorothy Getlein, The Bite of the Print ; Satire and Irony in Woodcuts, Engravings, Etchings, Lithographs and Serigraphs (New York: C.N. Potter, 1963), 92. 200 Paul Crenshaw "Did Rembrandt Travel to England?" in In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias, ed. Amy Golahny, Mia Mochizuki and Lisa Vergara (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 126. 201 HB, Hercules Segers, 3.
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elsewhere when the inventory was taken. However, what is most likely is that they were
inventoried, but Segers’s name was simply not mentioned. Many entries in the 1656
inventory are vague, especially in the section on albums of drawings and prints. Entries
199, 201, and 202 of the inventory are books filled with prints and drawings by “leading
masters,” “many masters,” and “various masters,” respectively. Perhaps Segers’s prints
might have been part of entry 229, an album “full of landscapes by various masters.”202
Regardless, it is most probable that Rembrandt did have a number of Segers’s prints. He
was in possession of Segers’s plate of HB 1, Tobias and the Angel (Rembrandt altered it
to be a Flight into Egypt), which must have come from Segers’s estate after his death.203
Rembrandt’s eight Segers paintings made an unusually large collection, all things
considered. Of seventeenth century inventories, Rembrandt’s collection is the second
largest after the art collector Renialme. When one compares it to the rest of the 1656
inventory, it stands out. Of the paintings hung throughout Rembrandt’s home, the vast
majority were of his own making. After himself – in quantity of paintings owned –
Segers is second only to Rembrandt’s collaborator, friend, and fellow pupil of Pieter
Lastman, Jan Lievens.204 With such a sizable collection of Segers’s paintings, Rembrandt
was no doubt keen on his prints as well. However, he may not have owned enough for
202 Walter L. Strauss, Marjon van der Meulen, and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Rembrandt Documents (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 369-371. 203 Though it was common for artists to sell their own plates during their lifetime – indeed many of his contemporaries did so – it is highly unlikely that Segers did so. The way they were printed indicates that he kept them for longer periods of time, and occasionally revisited old plates to rework them. Moreover, if he had sold them earlier, one would expect to see larger quantities of impressions not printed by Segers, whereas Rembrandt’s Flight into Egypt is the only example we have. 204 According to the inventory, Rembrandt had hung about sixty-three paintings by his own hand (not including those listed as “retouched by” or “copy after”), nine by his friend Jan Lievens, eight by Segers, six by Adriaen Brouwer, five by Jan Porcellis, three by his son Titus van Rijn, two by his teacher Pieter Lastman, two by Rafael, Jan Pynas, and Aertgen van Leyden, one by Michelangelo, and around twenty by others. Strauss and Van der Meulen, The Rembrandt Documents, 348-387.
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them to have their own album, and thus they were relegated to the listings of “various
masters.”205
Unlike Segers, Rembrandt did work with print publishers and other printmakers to
produce and publish his designs. One of Rembrandt’s earliest etchings was the
Circumcision of c.1626, printed by the Haarlem publisher Jan Berendrecht. Stylistically,
it is somewhat similar to the etchings of Buytewech printed a few years earlier, albeit less
polished. Rembrandt apparently found the partnership unsatisfactory, as he ended their
relationship soon after.206 He then enlisted the talents of his pupil, Leiden printmaker Jan
Gillisz van Vliet (c.1600/10-1688) around 1631.207 Van Vliet executed a number of
reproductive prints in collaboration with Rembrandt, and his adaptation of Judas
extracted from the painting of Judas returning the pieces of silver became widely
known.208
205 Further support for Rembrandt having a collections of Segers’s prints is found in the work of Johannes Ruyscher (Jan Ruischer, Jan Ruisscher, Ruysscher; spellings vary), called ‘the Young Hercules’ (Jonge Hercules). The work of Ruyscher is little studied, with only one comprehensive study of his works, written by Eduard Trautscholdt and appended as an appendix to Haverkamp-Begemann’s Segers monograph. Ruyscher’s style was in the past indistinguishable from Segers, and many of his works were attributed to Segers in the scholarship before Haverkamp-Begemann’s monograph. The exact dates of his life are unknown, but he was likely in his twenties in 1649 when he married, and he died sometime after 1675. These dates make it very unlikely that he studied with Segers, and based on style the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie has guessed at an apprenticeship with Rembrandt around 1645. In his later life, he held positions as painter for the Brandenburg and Sachsen courts. If Ruyscher was in fact in Rembrandt’s workshop, it further supports the idea that Rembrandt owned significant a number of Segers’s prints. For more See Eduard Trautscholdt, “Johannes Ruischer: alias Jonge Hercules: Die Radierungen,” in Hercules Segers, The Complete Etchings, by Haverkamp-Begemann et al. (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema; The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 113-128; RKD, “Ruyscher, Jan.” 206 Ger Luijten, "Rembrandt the Printmaker: the Shaping of an Oeuvre," in Rembrandt, the Printmaker, ed. Hinterding et al. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Pub, 2000), 13. 207 Also called Jan Joris van Vliet, Johannes van Vliet, Johannes Gillis/Joris van Vliet. For comments on their collaboration, see White, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 21; Ernst van de Wetering, “Remarks on Rembrandt’s oil-sketches for etchings,” in Rembrandt, the Printmaker, ed. Hinterding et al. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Pub, 2000), 36-40; RKD, “Vliet, Jan Gillisz. Van.” 208 Rembrandt was perhaps encouraged by Constantijn Huygens’s praise of the painted Judas’s expression, so that he thought it best to have it widely distributed in the form of print. The print emphasizes many of the aspects of the work that Huygens praised. For a discussion of the letter, see Amy Golahny, Rembrandt's Reading The Artist's Bookshelf of Ancient Poetry and History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
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After Rembrandt’s earlier collaborations with Jan van Vliet and Jan Berendrecht,
he had no affiliation with any other publisher or printmaker, nor with any print workshop
in the traditional sense of the word. As with Segers, Rembrandt’s printmaking work
appears to have been somewhat of a private practice. Nadine Orenstein notes that despite
having countless pupils come through his studio, few took up the needle themselves, and
only one seems to have been significantly influenced by his printed oeuvre.209 Houbraken
(who must have known something of Rembrandt’s working practice, as his teacher
Hoogstraten was Rembrandt’s pupil) went as far as to say that “He had his own way of
working up his etched plates afterwards, and of preparing them: which he never let his
Students see: nor is it to be comprehended in which way it was done; thus this
invention… went to the grave along with the inventor.”210 In this somewhat dubious
account, the parallels to Segers’s own life are patent. Segers, too, had developed
techniques that died with him, either due to secrecy or to something we might call
privacy.
After his first few prints, Rembrandt experimented with various techniques while
etching tronies, or little heads, as small studies. He often etched beggars, as well as self-
2003), 47-48; For more on the collaboration of Rembrandt and Van Vliet, see Erik Hinterding, Martin Royalton-Kisch, and Christiaan Schuckman, Rembrandt & Van Vliet: A Collaboration on Copper (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996). 209 This being Ferdinand Bol. She conjectures that “One reason [that his students did not emulate his etching practice as they did his painting and drawing practices] may be that his printmaking technique was somewhat personal and unusual.” Of course, this understandably ignores the mostly unsubstantiated possibility of Johannes Ruyscher as a pupil. Orenstein, “Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked Lettering,” 6; She also ignores Jan van Vliet as a pupil, possibly because his status as pupil is complicated by the fact that he was subsequently employed by Rembrandt to execute and collaborate on Rembrandt’s prints. Alpers also discusses Rembrandt’s secrecy – if that is the right word: “What he treated as his most private preserve or property (in the sense that his assistants did not also etch), one that was labor-intensive, replicative in nature, and generally patron-free, was his most successful mode of production.” Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 101. 210 Hendrik J. Horn, The Golden Age Revisited: Arnold Houbraken's Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses (Doornspijk, The Netherlands: Davaco, 2000), 536-537.
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portraits and portrait studies of his mother. Ger Luijten calls these preliminaria because
they survive in small numbers indicating that they were not meant for as great a
distribution as his later prints.211 As small studies printed in limited runs they can be
related, in a way, to Segers’s entire oeuvre. However, with Rembrandt they are the
exception rather than the rule, later supplanted by works printed in much larger
quantities, and even by ‘proof states’ of seemingly unfinished prints printed in quantities
that show Rembrandt thought them suitable for circulation.212
Rembrandt consciously exploited the medium of the print in a number of ways.
First, he was clearly aware of its potential for spreading his fame, both as a painter and as
a printmaker. His practice of collecting works by “the principal masters of the whole
world” directed his own artistic production, not only in terms of his borrowings – which
were plenty – but also in terms of the dissemination of his name and skill through prints.
As Ger Luijten points out, Rembrandt had already placed himself amongst the masters
whom he admired, both figuratively and quite literally. Catalogued in his inventory
alongside albums of works by and other albums of works by Raphael, Mantegna, and
Lucas van Leyden, we find “a book of all Rembrandt’s works.”213 Since Rembrandt
never visited Italy, or perhaps never even left the Dutch Republic, his knowledge of the
Italian masters was largely limited to prints; and just as Raphael and Mantegna’s works
211 Luijten, "Rembrandt the Printmaker," 13. 212 Luijten, "Rembrandt the Printmaker," 13; See also Parshall “Unfinished Business,” 24. Although, Parshall seems to say that the earlier studies were meant for distribution. 213 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 13, 21.
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came to Rembrandt by way of print, his own reputation and work spread to Italy
primarily through prints.214
Rembrandt also created portrait prints by commission, by all indications a
lucrative endeavor, since production increased during hard times.215 In 1655, a patron
paid Rembrandt 400 guilders for a portrait etching, with the understanding that the patron
would retain the plate and printing rights.216 However, he was also careful to distinguish
his own prints from the mass-produced – and perhaps less artfully engraved – portraits
being produced by his publishing contemporaries. This is indicated by portraits he
executed in drypoint, whose smaller yields meant greater exclusivity.217 An emphasis on
exclusivity and an impetus to make each impression unique is seen in many of
Rembrandt’s prints. Like Segers, Rembrandt experimented with different supports – such
as vellum and Japanese papers – and wiped each impression individually resulting a great
degree of variation, though Rembrandt’s prints were rarely if ever colored or overpainted.
However, unlike Segers, Rembrandt’s reason for varying his prints was likely to increase
the collectability, rarity, and value of each impression. Indeed, Houbraken notes that
Rembrandt collectors would acquire varied impressions of the same print – and faults
Rembrandt for exploiting them in this way.218 Houbraken takes time to accuse Rembrandt
of being overly greedy in many aspects of his work, including his production of etching
214 Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, 100; It was once conjectured that Rembrandt once went to Yorkshire England around 1662, a theory largely dismissed since the mid twentieth century. Paul Crenshaw has revived the idea as a possibility not to be ruled out, though still conjectural. See Crenshaw "Did Rembrandt Travel to England?" 215 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 17. 216 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 17. 217 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 17. 218 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, 271; Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 20-21; Horn, The Golden Age Revisited, 474-475; Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, 100-101.
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states with minute changes, as well as charging a hundred guilders per student per year.
Houbraken tells us:
And still he was (greedy sounds unpleasant) so fond of money that his Students[,] noticing this, would occasionally as a joke paint nickels, dimes, quarters, etc. on the floor… for which he would mistakenly reach, but being embarrassed, never said anything about it.219
No such claims could ever be made of Segers.
Rembrandt also utilized the print medium as a quicker and cheaper substitute for
paintings, which he could exchange for favors. He made an etched portrait of tax
collector Jan Wtenbogaert in exchange for expedited disbursements, and in the 1650s his
practice of trading portraits for favors continued. To these ends, he made etchings of
Thomas Jacobsz Haringh, Pieter Haringh, and Abraham Francen, as well as an etching of
the country estate of Christoffel Thijs.220 His famous etched portrait of Jan Six was so
well known even during his lifetime that it served to further his own career as much as
Six’s. Its distinction is evident in the fact that the aforementioned portrait commissioned
in 1655 for 400 guilders came with the stipulation that it should be “equal in quality to
the likeness of Jan Six.”221
Rembrandt’s print production increased when his economic troubles were at their
worst, likely as a means to boost his income.222 He not only produced new plates for
printing, but also reprinted old ones that he had kept in his studio, a practice that will be
219 Apart from being a great anecdote, the idea of the trompe l’oeil money fooling the artist relates to the story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, and also to the work of Houbraken’s teacher, Samuel van Hoogstraten, whose art and writing deal with trompe l’oeil and the idea of the painting fooling even the most keen eyes, be they the eyes of an artist or a king. Horn, The Golden Age Revisited, 475; For more on Hoogstraten, see Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Ch. 4, “Art As Self: Trompe L'oeil.” 220 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 142. 221 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 17. 222 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 30.
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discussed again later; but he apparently sold many of these plates in 1653 to satisfy debts,
so that he could no longer reprint them himself.223 One further example serves to show
the market mindset of Rembrandt. When he sold his plate of Hagar and Ishmael in 1637,
a contract had to be drawn up stating that Rembrandt was only allowed to keep a few
impressions, which he was not allowed to sell but only to keep for himself.224 The buyer
was worried that Rembrandt might print a stockpile for sale after he no longer had the
plate. One can guess that the buyer felt the need to be cautious of the shrewd, if not
always fiscally responsible, Rembrandt.
It is known from Erik Hinterding’s study of the paper used in Rembrandt’s prints
that Rembrandt kept his plates and would return to them, as Segers did, although he
would reprint his in sizeable ‘editions’ rather than in only a few impressions.225 This can
be seen in two examples noted by Hinterding. Rembrandt’s Old Man Looking Down was
initially etched and printed in 1631. The second state was also printed in or around 1631,
evident from watermarks on the paper. Watermarks from other prints of the same state,
however, date from around 1634 indicating that he had brought out the plate a few years
later in order to pull impressions from it. Based again on papers of this and other prints, it
is possible to tell that some third state impressions date from around 1639, almost a
decade after the first state was etched and printed.226 Rembrandt’s Raising of Lazarus was
223 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 141. 224 Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 16; Also, Strauss and Van der Meulen, The Rembrandt Documents, 145-146. 225 Hinterding believes each ‘edition’ was about 25-50 impressions. I put edition in single quotes because the concept of an edition as we know it today did not exist. Rembrandt was one of (if not) the earliest printmakers to deliberately limit his own editions to drive up prices, as he did with The Three Crosses, discussed later in the present study. Hinterding Rembrandt as an Etcher, 50-51, 57; Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, 30. 226 Hinterding “Watermark Research,” 28-31.
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similarly shown by Hinterding to have been ‘editioned’ no less than eight times in a
number of states over the course of around ten years.227 Unfortunately, due to the small
size and heavy overpainting of Segers’s prints, relatively few watermarks have been
identified, and no dating analysis has been undertaken as with Rembrandt’s prints.228 Any
such study would, however, be less fruitful due to the number of Segers’s prints surviving
in unique impressions, the lack of any dates on his prints, and the small quantity of prints
in general.229 In any case, Segers’s messy practice would lead one to believe he also did
not have his papers organized in any way, grabbing what was most convenient in size or
weight, and thus watermark dating would likely be less reliable.230
Whereas Segers’s practice of returning to plates was related to trying different
color combinations or revisiting old compositions, Rembrandt’s reprinting of plates
seems to have been for largely monetary purposes.231 Like a one-man publishing house,
Rembrandt kept an inventory of his own plates, which he could print as needed. In this
way, he ensured a certain level of quality in his prints. Later in life, he was forced to sell
off a number of his plates, at which point we find uniform (and one might say uninspired)
wiping of his plates and more standardized prints. Segers’s practice is again less 227 Hinterding “Watermark Research,” 31-33; For further examples see Hinterding Rembrandt as an Etcher, 50-57. 228 Haverkamp-Begemann explains the difficulty of establishing watermarks, but does note that Segers tended to print on relatively thick papers, compared to his contemporaries. Any watermarks found by Boon and Verbeck are documented in his catalogue. HB, Hercules Segers, 46 and Part III, respectively. 229 Hinterding’s study relies in large part on the dated impressions of other Rembrandt prints, as well as their watermarks. He also notes the difficulty in establishing dates from watermarks with small prints and low editions. Hinterding “Watermark Research,” 27-28. 230 Other factors hindering watermark dating would be that due to Segers’s lower production overall, he would have perhaps gone through his paper stock more slowly and less regularly. 231 Rembrandt likely did not make every print with the intention of making money off of it. A number of his tronies and some of his portraits of Saskia – amongst other prints – seem to be made for himself and not particularly meant for distribution. But others of his printed sketches were printed enough to have been a not inconsiderable part of his production. Thus the lines between what was for profit and what was for himself are at times blurry, and the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. Luijten, “The Shaping of an Oeuvre,” 21.
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consistent. Whereas Rembrandt would print a batch of a certain state on the same paper,
and would use similar papers and inks throughout his career, Segers varied his inks and
his paper preparations, as well as altering his plates.232 Going back to an earlier plate to
reprint might have to do with having a certain color of ink prepared, along with a few
pieces of prepared paper, with which he could print any number of his etchings. This
finds support in many of Segers separate plates being printed in the same combinations of
ink color and paper preparation. For example HB 7IIc, 9Ia, 19b, and 19d are all printed in
what appears to be the same blue-green ink on paper prepared with the same light pink
wash.233 Haverkamp-Begemann notes that “since three of the five impressions of [HB 23]
are in the same colour combinations as three of the five impressions of [HB 26], it may
be assumed that these prints were made and printed at about the same time.”234 It should
be further clarified that it is possible that both plates were shelved, and both were brought
out later for a different color combination, thus “at or about the same time” might be
taken in reference to each combination.235
There are also some similarities in etching practice. One might say that in Segers,
Rembrandt found one after his own heart, for both artists not only experimented with the
medium in unprecedented ways but also unapologetically left some of the idiosyncratic
232 That is to say, although Rembrandt did print on Japanese papers as well as vellum, his use of Western laid papers was consistent enough and survive in enough impressions to reconstruct some of his practice through watermarks. 233 Haverkamp-Begemann notes whenever a ink and support combination is close to or the same as another print. HB, Hercules Segers, 76. 234 HB, Hercules Segers, 78-79. 235 This may not have been Haverkamp-Begemann’s meaning, but I believe it is plausible. This is especially true since HB 23IIe and 26b were printed in the same green on off-white color combination of 27Ih, and the green may appear on other impressions of HB 27. Moreover, Segers’s prints on fabric are sometimes the same dyed fabric or with the same preparation. Haverkamp-Begemann groups the following prints as stylistically similar and printed on similar fabric supports: HB 28, 35, 36, 40, 47, 52, 53, and 54. HB, Hercules Segers, 82.
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marks of their unusual approaches to printmaking. In “Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked
Lettering: Rembrandt’s Messy Aesthetic,” Nadine Orenstein calls Rembrandt was one of
the messiest printmakers of all time.236 This is hyperbole, of course, but the point is well
taken. Scratches, foul-biting, and the remnants of half-burnished earlier compositions
appear in a number of Rembrandt’s prints. Filippo Baldinucci (1624/5-1696/7) described
his prints as etched in “a most bizarre manner.”237 Take, for example, Rembrandt’s Three
Heads of Women, One Lightly Etched from around 1637 (Fig. 44), which in its first state
shows a single portrait of Saskia and in later states two more sketched female heads.238
Apart from the issues of ‘finish’ raised by the print, in either of its first two states one can
see scratches and stray marks as well as the burnished ghost lines of what was once the
artist’s signature. Orenstein and Rassieur also see the roof of a house, which could just as
easily be any number of things combined with stray hatching; in any case the marks are
not functioning in a representational capacity here but are rather indexical of a haphazard
working method.239 As was true for Segers, stray marks in the margins of the image are
of no concern, or at least not in these early states. Rembrandt did, however, return in the
third state to burnish the stray lines away, a peculiar decision in the context of the
236 Orenstein, Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked Lettering, 5. 237 “Una bizzarrimissima maniere.” Filippo Baldinucci, Comminciamento e progresso dell'arte dell'intagliare in rame… (Firenze: Nella Stamperia di Piero Matini all’Inf. del Lion d’Oro, 1686), 80; See also Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 1997), 272. 238 There are impressions of all three states at the Rijksmuseum, as well as a faithful copy of the first state. Hind 153; Bartsch 367. States I, II, and II are RP-P-OB-769, RP-P-1962-120, and RP-P-OB-770, respectively. 239 Orenstein, Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked Lettering, 7. Tom Rassieur, “Looking over Rembrandt’s Shoulder: The Printmaker at Work” in Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, ed. Clifford Ackley et al(Boston: MFA Publications, 2003), 47.
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unfinished sketch-like quality of the print itself.240 Segers rarely burnished away the ‘test’
lines he etched or scraped into the skies and margins of his prints, though on some
occasions he hid them with opaque paint when overpainting.241
There are further examples of Rembrandt’s messiness. In many prints, he was lax
in the preparation stages, leaving scratches instead of a perfectly polished plate.
Elsewhere, scratches seem to have come from careless handling of the plates. Evidence
suggests that he was no more careful in the etching stages. On some etchings, improper
cleaning of the plate – something Bosse specifically warns against – caused the thin
ground to lift while biting, which resulted in speckled and streaked foul-biting. Other
times, Rembrandt simply did not burnish unwanted lines enough, so that they remain in
later prints.242 All of these issues were essentially results of measures of expediency –
attributable to Rembrandt’s fast and loose style, or perhaps to an impatience with the
print process.243 Peculiarities such as these appear in Segers’s work as well. However, in
many cases Segers’s messiness was heavily considered, conscious decisions towards the
240 Orenstein, strangely enough, leaves the third state unmentioned, and looking only at the second state, she concludes that “while he removed many of the scratches, he purposely left certain other ones alone and incorporated them into the print.” Orenstein, Scratches, Speckling, and Crooked Lettering, 7-9. 241 For example, in HB 12a and 17Ia. Also perhaps in HB 2b and 2c, though here is is less covering up the stray scratches as much as he is covering up the hatched background which he leaves in HB 2a. 242 Some of these are present in Rembrandt’s Three Heads of Women, One Lightly Etched as noted by Orenstein. Clear streaks of foul-biting can be seen in Saints Peter and John Healing a Cripple at the Gates to the Temple, ca. 1626 (Hind 5; Bartsch 95) Tom Rassieur, “When things get Rough for Rembrandt,” Georgia Museum of Art Bulletin 21 (2001): 48. 243 Further measure of expediency can be seen in the cracking marks present on The Windmill of 1641, which resulted from the prepared plate being placed too close to coals so that the ground cracked. Rassieur also tells us “If he changed his mind while working on an image, he would often leave his discarded first thoughts in plain view. Initially, this was true of etchings that he seems to have made as private exercises, but as time went on he grew more willing to share evidence of his self-criticism in prints made for circulation… Impatience and inventive risk-taking sometimes led to mishaps that left their marks on his prints, but instead of discarding the botched work or taking pains to correct problems, he often chose to present the experience of partial failure as one that was attendant to brilliant achievement.” Thomas E. Rassieur, “Looking over Rembrandt’s Shoulder: The Printmaker at Work” in Rembrandt’s Journey, ed. Clifford Ackley, 45, 49.
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idiosyncratic. If we return to Segers’s HB 44a, we see the hatched drypoint blob
discussed earlier. Cutting corners did not make this mark. They are not the result of poor
handling or sloppy plate preparation. There was no “whoops” moment where Segers’s
stylus got away from him – the sort of thing that might explain some of Rembrandt’s
stray marks. To the contrary, these marks were labored over. The same is true for the
marred skies of The View through a Window of Segers’s House (HB 41), Rocky Valley
with a Road Leading into It (HB 12), and others. They show the attitude of a printmaker
entirely unconcerned with the polish of a ‘finished’ product, not one attuned to the needs
of the market.
That Rembrandt showed an affinity for the works of Hercules Segers, there can be
no doubt. In point of fact, one of the earliest documents showing the dissemination of
Segers’s prints is actually Rembrandt’s Flight into Egypt of 1653 (Fig. 45).244 In this
print, Rembrandt had somehow acquired Segers’s etching plate of Tobias and the Angel
(HB 1, Fig. 7) and had burnished out the figures in order to put in his own. This is the
only instance of Rembrandt having ever reworked the plate of another printmaker, as well
as the only evidence that any of Segers’s plates had ever been seen by another soul, as
none of them have survived.245 What was it about Segers’s plate that had drawn
Rembrandt to it? Perhaps Rembrandt, a great etcher and experimenter in his own right,
244 Hind 266; Bartsch 56. 245 Hinterding notes that it was not unprecedented for a printer to rework the plate of another artist, though perhaps this level of reworking was unusual. He gives the example of Visscher reworking a plate by Londerseel by replacing some of the figures. Indeed, this process finds a precedent in painting, where it was not unusual for a figure painter to provide ‘staffage’ for a landscape painted by another. Hinterding, Rembrandt the Printmaker, 290-291. Jaro Springer posits (and K.G. Boon entertains the idea) that Rembrandt’s The Three Trees (Hind 205; Bartsch 212) was also a reworked version of one of Segers’s prints. Jaro Springer, “Von Neuen Erwerbungen Des Berliner Kupferstichkabinetts,” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, Volume 1 (1908): 798.
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was curious about the strange etching techniques employed by Segers to create tone.
Certainly it still perplexes printmakers today, and Rembrandt’s interest in etched tone is
well documented in his prints.246
It may have been this significant transformation of a plate that had led Rembrandt
that same year to execute similar drastic changes in his own prints. Rembrandt had before
then changed his own prints, eliminating whole sections of compositions by cutting down
plates as well as burnishing plates in order to reuse them, the former finding precedent in
Segers’s practice of cropping his prints in order to obtain varied compositions. However,
in 1653 Rembrandt did something entirely different when he created one of his most
ambitious works, The Three Crosses (Figs. 46, 47).247 The print, executed entirely in
drypoint, was large and unique. The medium of drypoint ensured that the plate would
deteriorate quickly, and Rembrandt employed a rough and quick style that suited the
medium.248 As expected, the plate wore down after a few impressions and was retouched
a number of times.249 Up through the third state, there were relatively few changes.
However, in the fourth state, Rembrandt made the unprecedented decision to entirely
obliterate large portions of the composition in darkness, while also removing figures,
246 See Tom Rassieur’s discussion of intentional foul biting and experiments with tone in Rassieur, “When Things Get Rough For Rembrandt,” 50-52. 247 Also called Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves. Hind 270; Bartsch 78; The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 82nd and Fifth website has an episode by curator Nadine Orenstein titled “Altered States.” The web content includes side-by-side comparisons of three different states of The Three Crosses: 41.1.31, 41.1.32, and 41.1.33 (states I, III, and IV, respectively). See “Altered States,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art - 82nd & Fifth, http://82nd-and-fifth.metmuseum.org/altered-states. 248 For more on the number of prints that could be pulled from a drypoint plate see Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 50. 249 For an example of clear and obvious wear on one of Rembrandt’s drypoint plates, see Rassieur, “Looking over Rembrandt’s Shoulder: The Printmaker at Work” in Rembrandt’s Journey, ed. Clifford Ackley, (fig. 39) and 224 (no. 149).
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adding others, and altogether changing the scene depicted.250 The thief to Christ’s left,
formerly looking up and receiving the salvation of Christ, was now cast into darkness, as
the damned thief to his right was saved.251 Whole groups of figures on the left side of the
composition disappear while groups on the right have doubled in size. Of the two
prominent figures in the center of the foreground, only one has survived, the other
remaining only as a ghost. Such a change in composition would have required Rembrandt
to burnish and scrape large areas of metal before gouging his stylus through the already
marred surface of the plate, with the metal putting up resistance every step of the way.252
The violence of the process is evident in the deep and jagged lines, and by the smoky
blacks picked up by the drypoint burrs. He would repeat this action in his large drypoint
Ecce Homo of 1655, where in later states the foreground crowd of spectators was wiped
out in favor of two gaping dark archways.253 And while he was scraping and gouging, he
must have been reminded of his intervention with Segers’s plate, and possibly even of
Segers’s prints, of which no two look the same.254
Thus, Rembrandt and Segers’s lives are intertwined in the history of art. They
both – at least in myth – fell upon hard times and died destitute. They were both
experimenters and innovators, masters of the art of etching. Where Segers experimented
with overpainting and counterproofing, Rembrandt tried different supports such as
250 It was formerly thought – based on style – that the fourth state of this was done in 1660. Hinterding’s work on watermarks has cast this date into doubt, offering 1653 as an alternative. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 128. 251 For more on the change in meaning between the states, see Parshall “Unfinished Business” in The Unfinished Print, 25; Also, White, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 100-103. 252 This process – as well as the physical connection to the Flight into Egypt – is also described in White, Rembrandt as an Etcher, 100-101. 253 Hind 271; Bartsch 76. The drastic changes occur between states III and IV. 254 Münz also links the two prints in their use of drypoint. Ludwig Münz, The Etchings of Rembrandt. 2, A Critical Catalogue of Rembrandt's Etchings (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), 18.
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vellum and Asian papers. They employed somewhat similar printing practices. Both
would both store their plates and return to them periodically, while keeping records of the
various states and also wiping each impression in unique and subtly different ways. Both
were wary of print publishers and in the realm of prints, were more or less on their own.
But for all of their similarities, there were also patent differences. Whereas Rembrandt’s
own production was regularly motivated by self-promotion, fame, and monetary gain,
Segers’s production seems to have been anything but.255 He never cultivated a circle of
liefhebbers – or art lovers – to collect his works. He never attempted to work with a
publisher as Rembrandt did early in his career, nor did he ever collaborate with other
printmakers such as Van Vliet to help spread his fame. From the evidence that survives,
we could say that Segers may have never even showed his prints to another living soul –
or at least there is no substantive evidence to suggest that he did.
Finally, as we all know Rembrandt was the most famous artist of the Dutch
Golden Age and his reputation only grew thereafter. Segers, on the other hand, was
veiled in obscurity from the very beginning. These differences were at least in part a
result of differences in marketing practices. While Segers seems to have made no
attempts to distribute his prints, Rembrandt had his prints published early in his career,
then published them himself, and then sold the plates, resulting in further dissemination.
Segers’s prints seem to have made no impact until after his death, when they captured the
interest of only a few enthusiasts, Rembrandt foremost amongst them. Whatever the
reason for Rembrandt’s interest in Segers, it was contagious. It was likely what led his
255 Of course, Rembrandt was not solely motivated by money. His own stubbornness led to his losing a number of commissions. Despite his greedy reputation, he was sometimes unwilling to compromise his own art in order to please patrons, to his financial detriment.
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pupil, Samuel van Hoogstraten to praise Segers in his treatise on painting, and to lament
that no one had appreciated his prints while he was alive. A familiar lament still echoed
by Werner Herzog.
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CONCLUSION
The present study has demonstrated that Hercules Segers was not making his
prints for the open market and that his prints were in fact not in circulation until after his
death. The most compelling evidence for this is found in his prints. The stray etched
marks, the foul-biting, and the random burnished or hatched areas show someone
unconcerned with the standards of finish and polish required of prints published and sold
on the open market. Further considerations such as the etching and drypoint techniques
he used limited the potential yield of his plates, also indicating that he was ignoring
market concerns. The individualization of each print through hand-painting and cropping,
even on those with stray etched lines and what some might call ‘unfinished’ qualities,
also shows that the final product for him was not necessarily one sellable on the market.
The small number of surviving prints and the proportionally large number extant in only
a single impression indicate small print runs, likely not for the market. Finally, the
dirtiness of the prints themselves – in the form of dirt and wax deposits or offset on the
versos of prints – point to the conclusion that Segers did not have the market in mind
when printing, with its expectations of standardization and cleanliness.
That Segers was not distributing his prints during his lifetime is further supported
by the lack of impact they seem to have made on his contemporaries, and his absence
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from the clearly documented interactions within the print communities of Haarlem and
Amsterdam. Whereas Segers’s contemporaries – printers, landscape etchers, and
publishers – were thoroughly intertwined in their production practices, Segers himself
was entirely removed. Visscher, Berendrecht, and others published, acquired, copied, and
distributed the landscape etchings of Esaias van de Velde, Willem Buytewech, Willem
van Nieulandt, Jan van de Velde, Cornelis van Wieringen, Pieter Bruegel, and others. Yet
despite similarities in style and execution in a number of Segers’s prints – not to mention
overlap in subject matter, composition, and medium – no print by or after Segers was
ever published by a single publisher. Moreover, besides the entry into the Haarlem St.
Luke’s Guild in the same year as Esaias and Buytewech, no other indication of Segers’s
presence among them exists. Such a striking dearth is resolved by the conclusion that
Segers was not active within the printmaking community in Haarlem, and instead kept his
printmaking practices to himself.
The provenance of Segers’s prints and the archival record further support the
argument of this paper. The fact that there exists no evidence indicating Segers’s prints in
circulation until well after his death supports the conclusions already discussed. Michiel
Hinloopen’s large collection of Segers’s prints – likely acquired sometime during the
second half of the seventeenth century – indicates that Segers’s prints were kept together
in large batches rather than widely distributed. One could conjecture as to who it was that
acquired them after his death, and I have offered Johannes de Renialme as a possibility.
Renialme, already the owner of the most Segers paintings on record, is a likely candidate.
His connections to Rembrandt, and thus indirectly Hinloopen and Houbraken, would
account for the source of the majority of prints that survive today. The limiting of the
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majority of Segers’s prints to a few large collections is consistent with the theory that
they left his studio in bulk after his death.
Finally, when compared to Rembrandt – the other ‘freak’ of printmaking in
seventeenth-century Holland – Segers’s practice seems all the more strange. Although the
two shared some similar practices, and although they have often been placed side by side
as artists in kinship, Rembrandt and Segers were clearly working with different goals in
mind. Rembrandt’s approach to printmaking was often profit-driven, a quality that did
not go unnoticed – and perhaps exaggerated – by his contemporaries. Rembrandt limited
his editions to increase their rarity and value; he created prints of which different states
were actively sought by collectors; and he increased print production in times of financial
instability. Rembrandt, for all his Segers-esque innovation and idiosyncrasy, made prints
with the market in mind. Segers did not.
One final question needs to be addressed before the present study can be
concluded: why did Segers make these works, if not for profit? This question could be
answered in any number of ways, and in any case a great deal of conjecture would be
involved. The first and perhaps more likely possibility is that Segers was working
towards a workshop practice in which he could make prints individualized to the point of
being ‘paintings’, and that these ‘printed paintings’ could be made quickly and cheaply,
but sell for much more than standard prints.256 This hypothesis is supported by Segers’s
256 This idea was first suggested to me by Ad Stijnman. One might also relate this to the medium of the chiaroscuro – or multi-block colored – woodcut. Vasari described the chiaroscuro woodcut as possessing “the appearance of having been made with the brush after the manner of chiaroscuro.” These, however, only attempt to reproduce some of the tonal and coloristic effects of paintings, rather than actually blurring the lines between the mediums, as Segers was doing. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects, Volume VI (of X) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi, tr. Gaston du C. De Vere (London: Macmillan and Co. Ld. & the Medici Society, 1913), 106-107; Vasari attributed its invention to
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idiosyncratic working practice, where he would work up plates to a finished state, but
ignore the scratches and markings that would have detracted from the salability of the
prints. Any peculiarities found in Segers’s prints could be attributed to the fact that these
were essentially ‘working proofs,’ in preparation for a new workshop practice; or
alternatively, these scratches and stray lines could be covered up when over-painted.
With regard to the feasibility of such an operation one has only to look to Experiens
Sillemans, who created something of a hybrid of paintings, drawings, and prints in his
‘grisaille’ works. With these works, he printed various pieces that he would transfer onto
panel (via offset), and would then work up into a finished ‘painting’. What is perhaps
most curious about this process was that he would assemble them in the style of a
collage, prefiguring modern equivalents in Photoshop and Clipart.257 Thus, certain figures
appear throughout his compositions, along with the same boats and scenery, but the
composition of these elements shift, and the finishing of the images is always subtly
different.258
For Segers, however, the hypothetical endgame of commercially viable ‘printed
paintings’ was of course never achieved. One might suppose that economic hard times
had led Segers to abandon his project around the time he left his home on the
Ugo da Carpi, an early proponent in Italy, though it is may have developed earlier in the North, as the earliest dated example is a Burgkmair print of 1510. Sharon Gregory, Vasari and the Renaissance Print (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2012), 35, fig. 4.40. 257 A similar “cut-and-paste” practice is found in a few drawings by Raphael. Such cases were, however, limited to preparatory drawings. Moreover, the fact that they were drawings rather than prints is significant in the fact that Silleman’s purposes link more closely to the work of Segers. Both Silleman’s and Segers’s (hypothetical, for the latter) workshop practices were dependent on the idea of an initial investment of more time in order to save time in the long run. Raphael’s choices, though motivated in part by expedience, were not tied up in an investment/return dialectic. Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Raimondi, 116-117. 258 David Freedberg, “Paintings or Prints? Experiens Sillemans and the Origins of the ‘Grisaille’ Sea-Piece: Notes on a Rediscovered Technique,” Print Quarterly 1 (1984); See also Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 321.
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Lindengracht. If he were using a press in his own home, he would have likely sold it
when leaving Amsterdam, both due to its cumbersomeness as well as its value. But this
explanation leaves a number of questions unanswered. One wonders why Segers would
not have made prints for publication and circulation if he had already been making these
test plates on his own, especially if he had run into financial troubles. No doubt Visscher
would have published any number of Segers’s prints, had they been executed cleanly and
legibly. Moreover, the span of time Segers seems to have been printing his plates –
usually thought to be from around 1612 to 1630 – is a considerable amount of time to be
developing a new kind of workshop practice, only to give up on it after over a decade’s
work.
The alternative is that Segers made prints simply for his own enjoyment. This is,
however, somewhat unsatisfying as an explanation. It is troubling to say that all of
Segers’s etched work was no more than a hobby. The idea of the artist who makes art for
his own sake is a romantic one and perhaps difficult to make sense of, though examples
exist.259 Simon (Sam) Rodia (1879-1965) created the nearly hundred-foot-tall Watts
Towers in his garden in an impoverished area of Los Angeles over the course of three
decades; Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a Chicago janitor who had painted, drawn,
written, and typed an oeuvre of hundreds of works and thousands of pages within his
259 The Greeks believed the idea of the artist as divinely inspired precluded monetary compensation, and thus grouped the artist with artisans rather than poets. Kris and Kurz point out that such beliefs persist today. One need only think of the trope of the starving artist. However, the idea of art and commerce being to some degree mutually exclusive is firmly present in biographies of pre-modern Chinese painters. I any case, this too does not to be entirely equivalent, since Segers was working as an artist and making money. Ernst Kris, and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 113-114, 127.
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apartment, unbeknownst to anyone until after his death.260 For something closer to
Segers’s own time, we might think of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Despite becoming
one of the most recognized names of Western Art, his artistic production was somewhat
of an anomaly. Though Leonardo was certainly a gifted painter, and though he was
commissioned throughout his lifetime to make important paintings and sculptures for
prestigious families and courts, the number of paintings attached to his name are few, and
those finished are even fewer. Even when Leonardo did finish commissioned paintings
(he was also a notoriously slow painter), they were often not given to the patrons and
instead remained in his studio until his death. Moreover, the bulk of Leonardo’s
production were private notebooks filled with countless drawings, sketches, and notes –
in a cryptically mirrored text – and clearly not for public consumption. But Leonardo was
a salaried court appointee for most of his adult life, and his attentions were necessarily
divided.261
Early modern examples that more closely parallel Segers’s own production are
hard to come by – perhaps by virtue of the fact that their names and work would have
more likely been lost to history.262 Indeed, Rodia’s towers were nearly demolished after
260 Leland M. Roth, "Rodia, Simon," Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press, accessed April 11, 2013, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T072589; Henry Darger and Michael Bonesteel, Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 8, 13, 16-17. 261 Martin Kemp, Leonardo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11-13. 262 One might place il Mastelletta (Giovan Andrea Donducci, 1575-1655) in a similar category. Mastalletta, after having been involved in a triple poisoning at a dinner party, allegedly went into hiding fearing for his life. Afterwards, his temperament worsened, always filled with fear and mistrust. He moved to a remote location where he made small works for little money – ignoring patrons and potential commissions. Adam Elsheimer was similarly said to have become intensely depressed and withdrawn from artistic practice. But in these examples it is a mental instability which causes the artists to withdraw, and in any case their production decreases; whereas Segers seems to have always kept his print practices private, rather than withdrawing from a previous period of public production. The 20th century examples remain relevant. Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, 115-120.
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his death and a number of Darger’s works were thrown away before the discovery of his
seven-volume handbound manuscripts halted clean-up.263 But such comparisons again
raise questions about Segers’s mental state.264 Eccentric ‘outsider artists’ such as Rodia
and Darger have since their ‘discovery’ drawn associations with mental instability, and in
any case, Segers was not an ‘outsider artist.’ He was trained in the conventional manner
under the painter Gillis van Coninxloo; he joined the painter’s guild in the same year as
Willem Buytewech and Esaias van de Velde; and he was a respected painter during his
lifetime. Yet he stands apart. Segers stands alone in the history of the Dutch Golden Age,
or if not alone, alongside Rembrandt. Houbraken attributes to Rembrandt the quotation
that “a work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.”265 One wonders how to
judge Segers’s work, and we can only guess at his intentions. Are all of his works
finished, or are none?
In response to this, let us return to HB 12b (Fig. 2), the so-called Rocky Valley
with a Road Leading into It. When looking at this print, it becomes clear how entirely
unconcerned Segers was with the ‘finish’ of many of his prints. The title given it is
unfitting, as it imposes a finality on the print perhaps unintended by Segers. Titles such as
Mountain Study I or Landscape Study seem more apropos. Was he working towards a
final product more like HB 12a (Fig. 48)? It is difficult to tell whether or not Segers
painted this impression himself, and the small figures at bottom right appear to have been
263 Darger and Bonesteel, Henry Darger, 14. 264 The connections between artistic genius and mental instability, which have been traced back as far as antiquity, are discussed in Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, 98-102. 265 Parshall “Unfinished Business,” 19; Another quotation with similar sentiment is sometimes anecdotally attributed to Rubens. As a response to the question of when a painting was finished, he purportedly responded: “Sir, when their backsides look good enough to slap, there's nothing more to do.” Helen D. Hume, The Art Teacher's Book of Lists Grades K-12 (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 11.1.
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added later. The overpainting has certainly made it more legible as a landscape, and it
would have been more palatable to an early seventeenth-century print market. But HB 12
exists only in two impressions, one apparently resolved by way of overpainting, while the
other retains its enigmatic blob in the sky. If Segers was making his prints for the market,
rather than for himself, one would expect more ‘resolved’ prints than unresolved.
Regardless, it is in prints such as HB 12b that we are best able to reconstruct Segers’s
workshop practice. He reveals the surface of the plate by way of his treatment of the
subject, and gives hints to the processes involved by leaving the marks of his
experimentation unburnished in the sky. Thus, unlike the ‘inroads’ discussed by
Hochstrasser, in HB 12b Segers invites the viewer in by sheer force of curiosity. His
prints beg to be resolved; and yet, they resist.
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FIGURES
1. Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul, 2012, projection and sound installation at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (www.artfcity.com)
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2. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It (HB 12b), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 16.2 x 24 cm. Rijksmueum, Amsterdam
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3. Meindert Hobbema, The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689, oil on canvas, 103.5 x 141 cm. National Gallery, London. NG 830
96
4. Hercules Segers, Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road: Version I (HB 17IIb), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, 16.7 x 15.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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5. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall: Version I (HB 21IIId), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, 14.3 x 19.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
98
6. Hendrik Goudt after Adam Elsheimer, Tobias and the Angel, 1613, engraving, 25.5 x 25.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-52.971
99
7. Hercules Segers, Tobias and the Angel (HB 1a), c.1613-1635, etching on paper, 20.1 x 27.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
100
8. Willem van Nieulandt, View of the Therms of Diocletian, c. 1602-1610, etching on paper, 10.6 x 12.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-4153
101
9. Hercules Segers, Roman Ruins (HB 43a), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 9.6 x 13.5 cm, Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf
102
10. Hercules Segers, four impressions of River Valley with a Waterfall: Version I (HB 21Ia, 21IIb, 21IIId, and 21IVe, clockwise from top left), c.1611-1635
103
11. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall: Version II (HB 22IIe), c.1611-1635, etching on prepared paper, 14.7 x 19.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
104
12. Hercules Segers, River Valley with Four Trees (HB 4Ib), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 28.6 x 47 cm. British Museum, London
13. Hercules Segers, Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6Ib), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 28.6 x 47 cm. British Museum, London
105
14. Hercules Segers, The Large Tree (HB 34a), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 21.6 x 27.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
15. Hercules Segers, detail of Figure 14
106
16. Hercules Segers, detail of Plateau in Rock Mountains (HB 10Ia), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, 13.5 x 18.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
17. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery (HB 44a), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 13.7 x 21 cm. British Museum, London
107
18. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery (HB 44b), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 10.1 x 21.1 cm. British Museum, London
19. Claes Jansz Visscher, Pleasant Places, Vierbake t’Sandtvoordt (Contents), 1612, etching and engraving on paper, 10.2 x 14.5. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1879-A- 3463
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20. Jan van de Velde, Eighteen Landscapes and Ruins (Title Sheet), 1615, etching on paper
21. Hercules Segers, detail of Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6IId), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on paper, subsequently overpainted, 22.4 x 48.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (photo by the author)
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22. Hercules Segers, detail of Valley with Towns, Churches and Other Buildings (HB 29h), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on paper, overpainted, 20.2 x 32.9 cm. British Museum, London (photo by the author)
23. Hercules Segers, detail of Figure 22, verso (photo by the author)
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24. Hercules Segers, detail of Figure 4, verso (photo courtesy Ad Stijnman)
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25. Hercules Segers, detail of Mountain Valley with Broken Pine Trees (HB 3) verso, c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, 27.9 x 40.9 cm. British Museum, London (photo by the author)
26. Claes Jansz Visscher, Pleasant Places, Onder Wegen Heemstee, 1612, etching on paper, 10.3 x 15.6 cm. British Museum, London, 1987,1003.17
112
27. Hercules Segers, Winding River in a Valley (HB 14Ia), c.1611-1635, lift-ground etching on paper, 17.5 x 21.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
113
28. Hercules Segers, Valley with Towns, Churches and Other Buildings (HB 29c), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, subsequently colored, 20.2 x 32.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
114
29. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Large Landscapes, 1553-1556, etching on paper, 36.1 x 46.3 cm. British Museum, London, 1933,1209.16
115
30. Hercules Segers, Country Road with Trees and Buildings (HB 37), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on paper, 23 x 27.5 cm. British Museum, London
116
31. Gillis van Coninxloo, Forest Landscape, 1600, oil on panel, 56 x 85 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna
32. Willem Buytewech, Various Small Landscapes (Verschey den Lantschapjes), 1621, etching on paper, 8.8 x 12.8 cm. British Museum, London, S.4834
117
33. Hercules Segers, View of Amersfoort (HB 30), c.1611-1635, etching and drypoint on prepared paper, 8.6 x 30.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
34. Hendrik Goltzius, Dune Landscape near Haarlem, 1603, pen and brown ink on paper, 9.1 x 15.4 cm. Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, H 253 (PK)
35. Jan van de Velde, Eight Landscapes (Landscape with Haarlem in the Distance), c.1614-1618, etching on paper. (Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, fig. 87)
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36. Willem Buytewech, Various Small Landscapes, Chapel at Eyckenduyn, 1621, etching on paper, 8.7 x 12.6 cm. British Museum, London, S.4835
37. Esaias van de Velde, Path Leading to a Farm, c.1615 -1616, etching on paper, 6.9 x 10.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-15.554
119
38. Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Oaks, 1632, oil (on canvas?). Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Romanov, “A Landscape with Oaks,” Fig. 1, pp188)
39. Hercules Segers, Old Oak Tree and Distant View (HB 28a), c.1611-1635, etching on dyed cotton, 7.2 x 13.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
120
40. Hercules Segers, detail of Figure 2 (photo by the author)
41. Hercules Segers, detail of Figure 30 (photo by the author)
121
42. Hercules Segers, Skull (HB 53), c.1611-1635, etching on dyed cotton, 7.4 x 10.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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43. Hercules Segers, The Two Trees (HB 33), c.1611-1635, etching on prepared paper, 15.4 x 17.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
123
44. Rembrandt van Rijn, Three Heads of Women, One Lightly Etched, c. 1637, etching on paper, 12.7 x 10.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-769
124
45. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1653, etching on paper, 21.1 x 28.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1962-31
125
46. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses (third state), 1653, etching on paper, 38.7 x 45.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-617
126
47. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses (fourth state), 1653, etching on paper, 37.5 x 45 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam RP-P-1962-40
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48. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Road Leading into It (HB 12a), c.1611-1635, etching on paper, 16.2 x 24.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
128
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1981. Ackley, Clifford S., Ronni Baer, Tom Rassieur, and William W. Robinson. Rembrandt's
Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher. Boston: MFA Publications, 2003. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983. Alpers, Svetlana. Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988. Baldinucci, Filippo. Comminciamento e progresso dell'arte dell'intagliare in rame : colle
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