If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé, in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a country would be a wild conjecture.
There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.
In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing Tobias and the Angel, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the engraving,[5] Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings (Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered; but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and has become his own.
At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold. Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own, and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject, leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.
Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656, bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on which had been etched the Tobias and the Angel. It was re-worked by Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a Flight into Egypt.[6] (See Fig. 13.)
The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.
Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own Tobias and the Angel,[7] a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has called them, of Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all the landscape painters of Holland—Philip de Koninck.
To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually asserted
Fig. 13.—The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236.