14 Facts About Hercules Seghers

Hercules Seghers has been called "the most inspired, experimental and original landscapist" of his period and an even more innovative printmaker.

Hercules Seghers' father died in 1612, after which he returned to Haarlem, joining the Haarlem Guild of St Luke.

Hercules Seghers returned to Amsterdam in 1614 to obtain custody of an illegitimate daughter, and the following year married Anneken van der Brugghen from Antwerp, who was sixteen years older than he was.

Hercules Seghers appears to have died by 1638, when a Cornelia de Witte is mentioned as widow of a "Hercules Pieterz".

Some later sources said that Hercules Seghers took to drink towards the end of his life and died after falling down the stairs.

Hercules Seghers 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.

Hercules Seghers 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.

Rembrandt collected both paintings and prints by Hercules Seghers, and acquired one of his original plates, Tobias and the Angel, which he reworked into his own Flight into Egypt, keeping much of the landscape.

Rembrandt reworked the Hercules Seghers painting Mountain Landscape, now in the Uffizi, and his landscape style shows some influence from Hercules Seghers.

Hercules Seghers's Pile of books is an unusual still-life subject for a 17th-century print.

Hercules Seghers seems to have invented the "sugar-bite" aquatint technique, which was rediscovered in England over a century later by Alexander Cozens.

Hercules Seghers was probably best known to his contemporaries for his paintings of landscapes and still-life subjects such as The River Valley; his paintings are rare, with perhaps only fifteen surviving.

Hercules Seghers painted landscapes tend to show a wide horizontal view, with emphasis on earth rather than sky; two in the Gemaldegalerie, Berlin had strips of sky added at the top later in the century to meet a changed taste.

Apart from Coninxloo, Hercules Seghers drew from the Flemish landscape tradition, perhaps especially Joos de Momper and Roelandt Savery, but the "fantastic and visionary aspects of Mannerist" landscape painting.