The Enclosed Valley

On this small surface, Dutch painter and printmaker Hercules Segers conjured a view of an expansive landscape, dark and craggy in the foreground, with a vast mountain range expanding into the distance. Employing a poetic combination of dark printed lines and freely applied watercolor washes, Segers's carefully composed valley harkens back to the masterful atmospheric landscapes popularized by such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German and Netherlandish artists as Albrecht Altdorfer, Peter Bruegel the Elder, and Hendrick Goltzius.

Only a handful of paintings firmly attributed to Segers are known today, contributing to the difficulty in establishing a precise chronology of the artist's oeuvre. Deter mining dates for Segers's etchings proves equally problematic, since he often reused plates and touched them up with watercolor washes at various times. A number of Segers's works were formerly owned by Rembrandt, who was captivated by the older master's purposeful blurring of boundaries between painting, drawing, and printmaking and was influenced by his use of colored inks and a variety of paper, often hand-colored, for dramatic effect.

Approximately fifty-four different plates by Segers have been identified, with just over 180 impressions known today, including about twenty-one impressions of The Enclosed Valley. Oberlin's is the first state (of four) printed on linen fabric primed with white lead and dyed or toned a light brown. Dark areas of printed ink funnel seamlessly toward the deep mountain vista evoked through careful application of rich green and blue watercolor washes.

Oberlin's Segers print has an important history of ownership that dates back to the early eighteenth century, when it was in the collection of printmaker Jacob Houbraken (1698-1780). Sometime between 1746 and 1756, architectural historian Karl Heinrich von Heineken obtained this impression for August III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (1696-1763). Later, it entered the State Art Collection (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen), Dresden. In 1923, when the print was deaccessioned, it was acquired by the Dutch collector and connoisseur Frits Lugt (1884-1970), widely known for his seminal reference workLes Marques de collections (a manual of collector's marks that trace the provenance of works on paper) and for the Institut Néerlandais, the cultural foundation he and his wife established in Paris. Although the AMAM purchased the Segers print from a New York dealer, it is interesting to note that during World War II, Lugt temporarily relocated his family from the Netherlands to Oberlin, Ohio, in part because of his friendship with Oberlin professor of art Wolfgang Stechow.