Hercules Seghers - Prints

Prints

He is mainly known for his highly innovative etchings, mostly of landscapes, which were often printed on coloured paper or cloth, and with coloured ink, and hand-coloured and often hand-cropped to different sizes. He also made use of drypoint and a form of aquatint as well as other effects, such as running coarse cloth through the press with the print, for a mottled effect.

Altogether only 183 known impressions survive from all his fifty-four plates and most are now in museums; the Rijksmuseum print room has easily the best collection. Rembrandt collected both paintings (he had eight) and prints by Seghers, and acquired one of his original plates, Tobias and the Angel (HB 1), which he reworked into his own Flight into Egypt (B 56), keeping much of the landscape. Rembrandt also reworked the Seghers painting Mountain Landscape, now in the Uffizi, and his landscape style shows some influence from Seghers.

Although the dating of his prints remains unclear, his Town with four towers (HB 29) is believed both to be one of the later prints and, by comparison with paintings, to date from around 1631. Given the small number of surviving impressions, it is unlikely that prints were a major source of income for him. His Pile of books (see Rijksmuseum link) is an unusual still-life subject for a 17th century print.

He seems to have invented the "sugar-bite" aquatint technique, which was rediscovered in England over a century later by Alexander Cozens (it is also called lift-ground etching).