Exhibitions
Going Dutch
Laura Gascoigne
Hercules Segers; Frans Post: Animals
in Brazil
Rijksmuseum, until 8 January 2017
Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master
of Landscape
Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 January
2017
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 impor-
tance in the 17th century. In his Introduction
to the Academy of Painting (1678), Samuel
van Hoogstraten included a chapter head-
ed ‘How an Artist Should Conduct Himself
in the Face of Fortune’s Blows’. Top of his
casualty list of artists ‘murdered by pover-
ty... because of the one-sidedness of sup-
posed art connoisseurs’ was the landscape
painter and printmaker Hercules Segers
(c.1589–1633).
This year, the Rijksmuseum in Amster-
dam 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 retrospec-
tive in the museum’s Philips Wing, you can
understand why.
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 panoram-
ic 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 immeas-
urable spaces’.
If Segers’s paintings were original, his
prints were radical. The commercial advan-
tages of the multiple were apparently lost on
him — although he worked in series, no two
prints of his are alike. With their different-coloured grounds and overpainting in oils,
the eight versions of his ‘Distant View with a
Road and Mossy Branches’ (c.1615–30) are
like night and day. In experimenting with
what Van Hoogstraten called ‘printed paint-
ings’ he effectively invented the monoprint.
He also developed the sugar-lift etching
technique and was the first western print-
maker to use Japanese paper.
Necessity was sometimes the mother
of his inventions, as when he printed onthe marital bed sheets, to the horror of his
wife. But it was his artistic vision that was
truly revolutionary: his fantasy landscapes
of crumbling crags and wrinkled lava flows
are simply not of this world. Where did they
spring from? Their corrugated contours
seem to mimic the structures of corals,
shells and sponges that he may have seen in
contemporary cabinets of curiosity. Some
look like rubbings, prefiguring the frot-
tage drawings of Max Ernst — probably no
coincidence, as the prints so little valued
by Segers’s contemporaries that they were
used for wrapping butter and soap wouldIn the 18th century van de Velde’s
works were more sought after than
Rembrandt’s‘The beach at Scheveningen’, 1658, by Adriaen van de VeldeROYAL COLLECTION TRUST/© HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN