Hercules Seghers

Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (c. 1589 – c. 1638) was a Dutch painter and printmaker of the Dutch Golden Age. He has been called "the most inspired, experimental and original landscapist" of his period and an even more innovative printmaker.

Hercules was born in Haarlem, the son of Cathalina Hercules and Pieter Seghers, a Mennonite cloth merchant, originally from Flanders, who moved to Amsterdam in 1596. There Hercules was apprenticed to the leading Flemish landscapist of the day, Gillis van Coninxloo, but his apprenticeship was presumably cut short by Coninxloo's death in 1606. Seghers and his father bought a number of his works at the auction of the studio contents, as Pieter Lastman did. Seghers' father died in 1612, after which he returned to Haarlem, joining the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke.

He returned to Amsterdam in 1614 to obtain custody of an illegitimate daughter, and the following year married Anneken van der Brugghen from Antwerp, who was sixteen years older than he was. In 1620 he bought a large house in the Jordaan on the Lindengracht for about 4,000 guilders, but by the late 1620s he was in debt, and in 1631 had to sell it.