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Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Hercules Pietersz. Segers

Landscape with Armed Men

Oil on canvas.
36.5 x 54.3 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
370
(
1980.29
)
Room 26
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
With the art of Hercules Segers, Dutch landscape painting turned to new directions. Trained in the circle of the Amsterdam Mannerist artist Gillis van Coninxloo, Segers’ early work reveals Flemish influence. His paintings and the important position that he held as a graphic artist, in which he experimented with inks and supports, make him one of the most notable Dutch landscape artists of the early 17th century. His surviving oeuvre is small and only eleven oil paintings are known. Furthermore, they are undated, which has made it difficult to establish their chronology. We know from literary sources, however, that his output was originally much larger and that he was appreciated by an elite circle that included Rembrandt who owned eight of his oils in 1656. In the 1630s Rembrandt was interested in Segers’ fantastical panoramic views and in his distinctive use of dark tones and the influence of Segers is evident in Rembrandt’s work during this period.

In the present work with its high viewpoint, Segers depicts a broad area of landscape framed by low hills covered with trees on the left in the foreground and on the right in the middle distance. The low horizon line allowed him to depict a large area of ground in which land and water are combined and which terminates with the distant seashore, creating a sense of depth. The characteristic use of brown tones in the dry shrubs in the foreground lead into a zone that combines greens and yellows to create the vegetation in the distance, dotted with various red notes in the façades of the buildings. This spatial organisation is assisted by the light, organized into broad strips of ground in shadow alternating with lighter ones, a procedure that would subsequently find its maximum expression in the work of landscape painters such as Philips Koninck and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Landscape with armed Men has been compared with regard to its date with two works by Segers in the Boijmans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam: Landscape with a Lakeand Valley with a River and Houses. Both works, which have a similar composition to this one, have been dated to the 1620s. The three date from slightly after the famous Mountain Landscape in the Uffizi, Florence, which belonged to Rembrandt and which that artist re-touched.

This canvas entered the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection from the UK art market in 1980. It had previously belonged to the Historical Society Museum and Art Gallery of New York where it is recorded in 1867. It was auctioned in New York by Parke-Bernet in 1972. While with the Historical Society it was catalogued as by Salomon van Ruysdael but was re-attributed to Segers by Haverkamp-Begemann.

In 1987 the canvas was studied using infra-red reflectography. This revealed areas that were not original, such as the high tower almost in the centre, as well as extensive re-touching in the branches and leaves in the foreground. These modifications also affected the figure with the musket, which reappeared after the picture surface was cleaned during the time the canvas was with Edward Speelman.

Mar Borobia
17th Century - Dutch paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Jacob van Ruisdael Jacob van Ruisdael
Temporary Exhibition
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Landscape with Armed Men. Paisaje con hombres armados, década 1620
Landscape with Armed Men
Hercules Pietersz. Segers

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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Landscape with Armed Men. Paisaje con hombres armados, década 1620
Landscape with Armed Men
Hercules Pietersz. Segers

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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