Hercules Segers

Only a few works are known by the Haarlem painter and etcher Hercules Seghers. No more than eleven paintings are considered autograph. Four of them are in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Yet Seghers was an eminent painter in his time. His work was represented in the collections of the king of Denmark and the stadtholder in The Hague. Rembrandt too was impressed by his talent and owned eight of his paintings.
The paintings were often partly real and partly fantasy. He combined existing scenes with imagination, and seemed to be in between the fantastic, precise landscapes of the Flemish (like De Momper) and the Dutch ‘realism’. This made Seghers unique in Netherlandish seventeenth-century painting.