Life
Hercules was born in Haarlem, as the son of a Mennonite cloth merchant, originally from Flanders, who moved to Amsterdam in 1596. There Hercules was apprenticed to the leading Dutch landscapist of the day Gillis van Coninxloo, but his apprenticeship was presumably cut short by Coninxloo's death in 1606. Seghers and his father bought a number of his works at the auction of the studio contents, as Pieter Lastman did. Seghers' father died in 1612, after which he returned to Haarlem, joining the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. He returned to Amsterdam in 1614 to obtain custody of an illegitimate daughter, and the following year married Anneke van der Brugghen from Antwerp, who was sixteen years older than he was. In 1620 he bought a large house in the Jordaan on the Lindengracht for about 4,000 guilders, but by the late 1620s he was in debt, and in 1631 had to sell it. From his studio at the top of the house, which was pulled down in 1912, he had a view on the recently finished Noorderkerk which is on one of his etchings. In the same year he moved to Utrecht and started to sell art. In 1633 he moved to the Hague. He appears to have died by 1638, when a Cornelia de Witte is mentioned as widow of a "Hercules Pieterz.". Like much of the detailed documentation of Segher's life, this link depends on the assumed rarity of his first name. Some later sources said that Segers took to drink towards the end of his life and died after falling down the stairs.
His posthumous reputation was boosted by the Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the High School of Painting) of Samuel van Hoogstraten which presented him rather as a Romantic genius avant la lettre, lonely, poor and misunderstood, based mostly on his etchings.
Read more about this topic: Hercules Seghers
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cöoperates, and therefore it is not in vain. But alas! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)