Rocky Landscape

Hercules Seghers spent his life painting strange, bare mountains that almost no one wanted to buy. He died around 1638, poor and largely forgotten, having sold so little that fewer than 15 of his paintings survive today. One man understood him completely. Rembrandt owned eight works by Seghers, kept one of his printing plates, and bought this very landscape. Then Rembrandt did something extraordinary to it. He reworked the panel himself, adding a cart drawn by oxen in the foreground and fresh clouds across the sky, improving a picture he loved. So this quiet Dutch mountain scene carries the work of two great painters at once. Look low in the foreground for the cart that Rembrandt, not Seghers, put there.