Hercules Seghers

When Rembrandt sorted through his own collection, he kept eight paintings by Hercules Seghers and one of his printing plates, which he later reworked into a landscape of his own. That tells you something about a man most of his contemporaries barely noticed.

Seghers worked in Holland in the early 1600s and treated printmaking as if the usual rules did not exist. He pulled his etchings on coloured cloth and tinted paper, inked them in unexpected colours, painted over them by hand, and trimmed each sheet to a different size, so that no two impressions came out the same. He built up mottled, rocky textures by running coarse fabric through the press with the plate. Landscapes were his subject, often bare mountains and valleys he had likely never seen, closer to visions than to any real Dutch view.

He seems to have died around 1638, poor and little known, and only about 183 impressions from his 54 plates survive, most now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The plate Rembrandt bought, a scene of Tobias and the angel, still carries Seghers' landscape beneath the figures Rembrandt added on top.