Laura Gascoigne

Going Dutch | 27 October 2016

Two extraordinary Dutch artists, Hercules Segers and Frans Post, who failed to strike gold in the Golden Age at the Rijksmuseum – and one who did, Adriaen van de Velde, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

In debates about what should and should not be taught in art school, the subject of survival skills almost never comes up. Yet the Dutch, who more or less invented the art market, were already aware of its importance in the 17th century. In his Introduction to the Academy of Painting (1678), Samuel van Hoogstraten included a chapter headed ‘How an Artist Should Conduct Himself in the Face of Fortune’s Blows’. Top of his casualty list of artists ‘murdered by poverty …because of the one-sidedness of supposed art connoisseurs’ was the landscape painter and printmaker Hercules Segers (c.1589–1633).

This year, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted three shows devoted to Dutch artists who failed to strike gold in the Golden Age, of whom Segers is the most extreme example. ‘No one wanted to look at his works in his lifetime,’ Van Hoogstraten tells us, and entering his first full retrospective in the museum’s Philips Wing, you can understand why.

'Road Skirting the Plateau, a River in the Distance', (c.1615–30), by Hercules Segers. Photo: Rijksmuseum

‘Road Skirting the Plateau, a River in the Distance’, (c.1615–30), by Hercules Segers. Photo: Rijksmuseum

Segers was at least two centuries ahead of his time. True, his landscape paintings fit within the Netherlandish tradition, despite stretching the possibilities of the panoramic vista almost to breaking point with their mountain valleys crisscrossed by fenced fields and their rivers winding into infinity. He was not the only flatlander to dream of mountains, Mediterranean light and cypress trees; the difference was that unlike his Dutch Italianate peers he never seems to have travelled further than Brussels. But that was no bar to an imagination described by Van Hoogstraten as ‘pregnant with whole provinces, giving birth to them with immeasurable spaces’.

If Segers’s paintings were original, his prints were radical. The commercial advantages of the multiple were apparently lost on him — although he worked in series, no two prints of his are alike.

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