Valle fluvial

Hercules Seghers is one of the strangest figures of the Dutch Golden Age, and one of the most obscure; we are not even certain of the years he was born or died. He made haunted, mountainous landscapes at a time when his neighbours were painting flat, tidy Dutch fields, and he experimented so freely with printing, colour and paper that some of his methods still can't be fully explained. This painted river valley, from around 1628, has that high, dizzying vantage point he liked, borrowed from an older Flemish way of seeing land. He sold little and is said to have died poor. One painter did understand him: Rembrandt owned eight of his works and even reworked one of his printing plates.