Page of A River Valley with a Group of Houses by SEGHERS, Hercules in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

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A River Valley with a Group of Houses

c. 1625
Oil on canvas, 70 x 86,6 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Hercules Seghers is best known today as an innovative printmaker. In the most recent catalogue 54 etchings are listed, with only 183 impressions in all: this unusually small number was a consequence of Seghers's unconventional and painstaking working procedure. He regarded each impression as a unique work of art, often printing impressions on rare papers and fabrics (including silk). According to the painter-critic Samuel van Hoogstraten, Seghers 'printed ... paintings'. There are relatively few paintings by Seghers. There are four (or possibly five) signed pictures and a group of others which can be assigned to him with confidence on the basis of comparison with these and the etchings.

In this painting of about 1625 Seghers combined views familiar to him in an imaginary setting. The landscape was formerly identified as the valley of the River Maas (Meuse) and while it is not topographically accurate, it is probably based on his memories (presumably recorded in the form of sketches) of a trip along the Maas where high, rocky mountains can be found rising from the flat meadows bordering the river. The houses in the foreground are those which Seghers saw from the window of his house on the Lindengracht in Amsterdam: it was a view which the artist etched. The placing of actual buildings into an imaginary landscape was not peculiar to Seghers: other seventeenth-century Dutch artists, among them Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan van Goyen and Aelbert Cuyp, also transposed well-known structures into an invented setting.

Seghers worked in Amsterdam but is recorded towards the end of his life in both Utrecht and The Hague. He seems to have enjoyed little contemporary success and is cited by van Hoogstraten as an example of an artist who was treated badly by fortune and whose true worth was discovered only after his death. He related that Seghers, despairing of ever achieving success, took to drink and died after falling downstairs while drunk. His exact date of death is unknown: he is last recorded living in The Hague, active as an art dealer, in January 1633.