Darker Horizon

Since the days of Hoving, however, the Met has been a beacon of high seriousness among the cultural institutions of America. And yet a recent article in the New York Times addressed a perceived decline in standards, as well as certain questionable decisions made by the museum’s board, such as overinvesting in modern and contemporary art.

Although the effects of their decisions may take time to appear, to date I have seen little evidence in the galleries. This past fall, for instance, the Met displayed nearly a hundred paintings by Valentin de Boulogne, a Baroque master almost certainly unknown to most visitors. On reaching the galleries, they found room after room of somber, truculent masterpieces, sometimes five versions of the same painting—each subtly different from its neighbors—arrayed across a wall. It was a great exhibition of a great artist, but it was not an easy show to love. It demanded the highest degree of concentration from viewers intrepid enough to see it through to the end.

Now another exhibition has opened: “The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers,” a Dutch contemporary of Valentin de Boulogne, but even less known and even more darksome. And although Segers was a gifted painter, as is evident in the six paintings in the present show, it is made up mostly of diminutive etchings (often several states of the same work) that demand, but also repay, the closest attention.

Hercules Segers (ca. 1590-ca. 1638) was relatively little known in his own day and all but forgotten thereafter, before being rediscovered toward the end of the 19th century, by the art historian and curator Wilhelm von Bode. But Segers was not entirely unknown, and no less a master than Rembrandt (16 years his junior) owned eight of his landscape paintings and paid Segers the supreme compliment of imitating him in his own work. Indeed, for centuries, many of Segers’s paintings were wrongly attributed to Rembrandt.

Mostly, however, Segers was an etcher, but one of the most fearless in the history of art. He saw in this medium vast avenues of innovation scarcely dreamed of by his contemporaries. Most of them were content to reproduce an etching—unchanged and in black and white—for as long as its metal plate would hold out. But Segers recreated his etchings as he went, coating each new impression in a different wash of pale blue, sepia, or absinthial green that oddly recalls the colored film stock that certain directors favored during the silent era. Nor did Segers scruple to add or efface lines on the finished plate, or even to cut the plate down as the feeling took him.

Among the etchings and paintings on view here are a few still-lifes and genre scenes. But Segers was overwhelmingly interested in landscapes, perhaps the defining artistic genre of Holland’s Golden Age, the 17th century. No Western nation, not even the fledgling American republic with its Hudson River School, was more devoted to this art form. But how different are the landscapes of Hercules Segers from those of his contemporaries—or, for that matter, the Hudson River School. In 17th-century Holland, painters revered reality in its most tangible hardness. Most Dutch painters refused to admit into their landscapes even the remotest tremor of sentiment or reverie, unlike their French and Italian contemporaries. The atmosphere of their works was often cloudy or damp, for such was the nature of the Netherlands; but rarely, if ever, did the artist’s mood intrude upon the facts on the ground.

In Segers, however, we see the artist’s soul projected outward onto the observable world, onto the hills and meadows of his native land. Instead of the flatness that his compatriots painted, he dreamed up, as needed, rivers and mountains that he probably had never seen in real life. Under his brush and burin, the plains of Holland become lunar landscapes. Ruins like the ravaged Abbey of Rijnsburg are transformed into a menacing spiritual trap, a Bluebeard’s castle of the mind. As in a fever dream, the observable world shifts without warning from the etherous indeterminacy of his Distant View of a Road with Mossy Branches to the near-blinding clarity of Ruins of Brederode Castle from the Southwest, wherein every brick is accounted for with a neurotic insistence that recalls the work of outsider artists.

If any Dutch precedent exists for the landscapes of Hercules Segers, it is the stylized late-16th-century works of Mannerists like Roeland Savery and Gillis van Coninxloo, under whom he studied. But there is a crucial difference: Those painters, influenced by Brueghel and the Italians, strictly adhered to a standardized formula for landscape painting that was shared by many in their generation. The distortions of Segers, by contrast, are entirely his own, the products of his inability (or refusal) to conform to the standards of his time. It is for this reason that he seems so strikingly to foreshadow, both in spirit and form, the Symbolists of the 1890s and the Surrealists of the 1920s.

Beyond those eccentricities, it should be said that Segers was, in terms of pure artistic competence, a master in an age of masters. As a landscape painter, quite aside from his etchings, he was the equal of almost any painter of his age. His vast panoramas, with a reduced tonalist palette that approaches monochrome in places, are skillfully conceived and composed, and often perfectly executed.

With the reader’s indulgence, I would like to take this opportunity to make a point about Rembrandt that may seem slightly out of place in an article devoted to Hercules Segers. We all know, for we have all been told, that Rembrandt was a great painter. But let the following observation serve as a testament to just how good he really was. He was not primarily a landscape painter, having painted only about 30 of them in his entire career, not counting drawings and etchings. And yet, in a culture which (as we have seen) was besotted with landscape painting, a culture that produced some of the finest masters of the genre who ever lived, Rembrandt, with those 30 paintings, was the greatest of them all. If you have any doubt, only look at The Mill in the National Gallery in Washington. Even Segers could not equal the power or strangeness of the younger master’s landscapes. And yet it is also true that Rembrandt could never have painted them as he did without the inspiring example Segers had set for him.

James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.