Hercules Segers (1589/90-1633/40) was an artist, like Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn, who wanted to fathom and reproduce the essence of nature and the world. There is no evidence that Segers ever travelled or saw mountains in real life. His strange and wonderful mountain landscapes and endless vistas bear witness to an unbounded imagination. Segers was a truly pioneering etcher, developing wholly individual, arcane techniques for his colourful etchings. Poets and artists down through the ages have been inspired and fascinated by his poetic and melancholic paintings and prints. Rembrandt owned no fewer than eight of his paintings. A total of eighteen paintings and a hundred and ten impressions of fifty-four prints will be on show in the Rijksmuseum. Exhibition: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, The Netherlands (07.10.2016-08.01.2017) / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA (2017).

A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands. The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has long served as a source of valuable insights on a range of topics, from firsthand reports of training in Rembrandt’s studio to contemporary engagements with perspective, optics, experimental philosophy, the economics of art, and more. Van Hoogstraten’s magnum opus—here available in an English print edition for the first time—brings textual sources into dialogue with the author’s own experience garnered during a multifaceted career. Presenting novel twists on traditional topics, he makes a distinctive case for the status of painting as a universal discipline basic to all the liberal arts. Van Hoogstraten’s arguments for the authority of what painters know about nature and art speak to contemporary notions of expertise and to the unsettled relations between theory and practice, making this book a valuable document of the intertwined histories of art and knowledge in the seventeenth century.

Hercules Segers (1589/90-1633/40) was an artist, like Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn, who wanted to fathom and reproduce the essence of nature and the world. There is no evidence that Segers ever travelled or saw mountains in real life. His strange and wonderful mountain landscapes and endless vistas bear witness to an unbounded imagination. Segers was a truly pioneering etcher, developing wholly individual, arcane techniques for his colourful etchings. Poets and artists down through the ages have been inspired and fascinated by his poetic and melancholic paintings and prints. Rembrandt owned no fewer than eight of his paintings. A total of eighteen paintings and a hundred and ten impressions of fifty-four prints will be on show in the Rijksmuseum.00Exhibition: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, The Netherlands (07.10.2016-08.01.2017) / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA (2017).

Discusses the Asian luxury goods that were imported into the Netherlands during the 17th century and demonstrates the overwhelming impact these works of art had on Dutch life and art during the Golden Age