| Segers has been called one of the great masters of the "fantasy" landscape. Ironically, in his drawings and etchings he revealed himself to be one of the earliest discoverers of the actual panoramic Dutch scenery that his followers Meindert Hobbema, Ruysdael, and Koninck later translated so beautifully into paint. Segers remains one of the most paradoxical figures in the history of art: recognized today as a seminal and towering figure, he is known only through a handful of paintings and a small oeuvre of etchings. A master at evoking landscapes of an epic, grandiose scale, he created those illusions on small, intimate surfaces; a master of the imaginary landscape, he injected such detailed observations into his fantasies that they became convincing evocations of nature at its most awesome and elemental. Conversely, his studies directly from nature take on the romantic associations of fantasy. Credited with phenomenal experimentation and innovation, Segers found his new vision within fairly narrow constraints; he limited both his subject (landscape - although he occasionally produced other subjects such as religious and marine themes and still lifes) and his materials (oil on canvas and, more often, paper - as well as etching tools). He also created daring variations in his etchings simply by hand-altering the image transferred from an etched plate. Today two drawings and eleven paintings are known, as well as 54 etchings with 183 impressions (the actual accepted number varies depending on the scholar), each of which is considered so distinctive as to be unique. Hoogstraeten spoke of them as "printed paintings." Little is known about Segers. Born in Haarlem, he was likely the pupil (before 1606) of Gillis van Coninxloo in Amsterdam, and he attended the sale of Coninxloo's estate in 1607, purchasing drawings, prints, and a painting. By 1612 Hercules was back in Haarlem and joined its guild, though two years later (1614) he returned to Amsterdam. There he made a settlement with the mother of his illegitimate daughter, gaining her custody. He married Anneken van der Brugg(h)en in 1615 at Sloterdijk, a nearby town. Documents place Hercules in Amsterdam in 1616, 1618, 1619 (when he purchased a house on the Undengradt), 1621, 1623, 1626, and 1629. In that year he may have traveled to Rhenen (he made two etched views of the town). In 1631 his house was sold to settle debts. Living in Utrecht by May 1631, Hercules sold some seventy paintings to an Amsterdam merchant. In 1632 the court at The Hague acquired two paintings. We next hear of him in January 1633 when he was living in The Hague, and after that records of Hercules Segers cease. A woman, presumed to be his second wife, was registered as a widow in 1638. Hoogstraeten describes Segers as poor and unrecognized and states that he died after falling down some stairs during a drunken escapade. Though he was never a popular success, Segers must have had at least a modest reputation in his own day, particularly among artists. Louys Rocourt, Herman Saftleven, and Jacob Marrel all had works by Segers noted in inventories of their estates. We know that in 1621 a collection offered to the king of Denmark included a work by Segers. Segers's most important admirer was Rembrandt, who owned eight of his paintings and one of his plates, which Rembrandt reworked. Rembrandt must have responded to the evocative nature of Segers's imagery, which elicits a different response from the viewer, inviting him or her to embellish on the raw material the artist has offered. Segers's images are starting points, visions that not only compellingly recall the past (as though in a dream) but urge modification by the viewer, thereby implying a future. Most of Segers's paintings and many of his prints involve highly imaginary and evocative views across mountains and rugged valleys. They clearly have their origins with the Flemish traditions of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Paul Bril, and Joos de Momper the Younger, whom Segers would have known through his teacher, Coninxloo. Segers's chronology and oeuvre is still a problem. His earliest pictures are thought to be a series of etchings, the most important of which are The Big Tree (formerly Dresden, Kupferstichkabinett) and Farmhouses in the Woods (London, British Museum), which anticipate many later artists, including Jacob van Ruisdael, for their heroic interpretation of trees. In other prints as well as in paintings, Segers's response to Flemish mannerist landscape traditions and the graphic work of Adam Elsheimer is evident. Segers's motif of ruins is known to derive in part from Willem van Nieulandt's prints published in 1618. Haverkamp-Begemann has assigned those paintings with Flemish characteristics to the years before 1620. A good example of such a work is River Valley (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). From this purely imaginative type of image, Segers evidently evolved to views of valleys rimmed by rocky ledges (such as his Mountain Valley, now in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, although this picture has been partly reworked by Rembrandt). Around 1620 or later, Segers began to include direct observation in his imagery. For example, in River Valley with Houses (Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), Segers incorporated houses he might have seen through his window into an imaginary mountainous plain. The effect is both haunting and disturbing. Completely still, devoid of humanity, timeless yet specific, his landscapes recreate the reality of a dream rather than the experience of ordinary observation. His pictures have, therefore, found a particularly responsive audience in the twentieth century because of their surreal quality. Several other panoramas featuring urban or rural subjects are ascribed to his later period - including Brussels (now in Cologne) and View of Rhenen (Berlin, Dahlem Museum, Gemaidegalerie), which exaggerate the panoramic effect and rank him among the earliest developers of the panoramic view. These pictures are generally dated to the 1630s. No one knows if Segers ever actually saw the kind of mountains he depicted-although if he traveled as extensively as has been suggested, he certainly would have. What makes his pictures so remarkable, however, is not the actual source of his images but how he interprets them. Within the timeless framework of his pictures, Segers manages to evoke the relentless transformation of nature by the passage of time. Strikingly contemporary, Segers's prints (the largest collections of which are now in the printrooms of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Bibliotheque National, Paris) have an affinity with the work of Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich and obviously have influenced modern masters such as Max Ernst. During his own era Segers profoundly inspired the work of Rembrandt and Philips Koninck. But neither master achieved the kind of timeless, solitary mystery that Segers created in the best of his work. |
