that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of Leblond.
Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany, Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from coloured wood-blocks.
But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.
Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an apparently complex effect.[8]
The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a brown ground.
Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings, and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in architecture.
On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately succeeded him.
He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.
III
The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some extent represented in Seghers.