1590-1638 Dutch Hercules Seghers Gallery Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (c. 1589 ?C c. 1638) was a Dutch painter and printmaker of the Dutch Golden Age. Segers is in fact the more common form in contemporary documents, and was used by the painter himself (modern use is about equally divided between the two). He was "the most inspired, experimental and original landscapist" of his period and an even more innovative printmaker. He was probably best known to his contemporaries for his paintings of landscapes and still-life subjects; his paintings are also rare, with perhaps only fifteen surviving (one was destroyed in a fire in October 2007 ). The Stadholder, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange bought landscapes in 1632. Many of his painted landscapes are fantastic mountainous compositions, whereas in his prints it is often the technical approach rather than the subject which is extreme. His painted landscapes tend to show a wide horizontal view, with emphasis on earth rather than sky; two in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin had strips of sky added at the top later in the century to meet a changed taste. Apart from Coninxloo, Seghers drew from the Flemish landscape tradition, perhaps especially Joos de Momper and Roelandt Savery, but also the "fantastic and visionary aspects of Mannerist" landscape painting. A 1680 inventory of Jan van der Capelle, who owned five paintings by Seghers, describes one as view of Brussels, which if correct would presumably mean Seghers travelled there, probably when young, when his style shows most Flemish influence (in so far as the chronology of his work is clear).  Related Paintings of Hercules Seghers :. | Mountainous landscape | Mountainous landscape | Mountain Landscape | Landscape with City on a River | Broad Valley Landscape with Rocks |
Related Artists:
David Klocker Ehrenstrahl
German, 1629-1698,Swedish nobleman and portrait painter who in 1652, at twenty-four years of age, at the request of Carl Gustaf Wrangel, moved to Skokloster Castle, from his art studies in the Netherlands. Between 1654 and 1661 he studied in Italy and visited the courts of both France and England. On his return he became entitled Court painter. He was raised to the nobility in 1674 and became court indendant in 1690. Mikael Dahl and David von Krafft as well as his daughter Anna Maria (born 1666) can be found among his pupils. The allegoric great hall ceiling fresco, named The Great Deeds of The Swedish Kings, in the Swedish House of Knights, made between 1670 and 1675, is considered to be his greatest work. A second version was made in Drottningholm Palace, the home of the Swedish Royal Family, in 1695. The Drottningholm fresco, also became the motive of the 1000th and ever largest postage stamp by Czeslaw Slania, the Polish
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Frankfurt 1749-1832 Weimar,was a German writer and according to George Eliot, "Germany's greatest man of letters and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism and science. Goethe's magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust. Goethe's other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. He also served at length as the Privy Councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar. Goethe is the originator of the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"), having taken great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, Arabic literature, amongst others. His influence on German philosophy is virtually immeasurable, having major effect especially on the generation of Hegel and Schelling, although Goethe himself expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense. Goethe's influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a major source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Goethe is considered by many to be the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in Western culture as well.
Johannes Adam Oertel
German, 1823-1909