In debates about what should and should not be taught in art school, the subject of survival skills almost never comes up. Yet the Dutch, who more or less invented the art market, were already aware of its importance in the 17th century. In his Introduction to the Academy of Painting (1678), Samuel van Hoogstraten included a chapter headed ‘How an Artist Should Conduct Himself in the Face of Fortune’s Blows’. Top of his casualty list of artists ‘murdered by poverty …because of the one-sidedness of supposed art connoisseurs’ was the landscape painter and printmaker Hercules Segers (c.1589–1633).
This year, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted three shows devoted to Dutch artists who failed to strike gold in the Golden Age, of whom Segers is the most extreme example. ‘No one wanted to look at his works in his lifetime,’ Van Hoogstraten tells us, and entering his first full retrospective in the museum’s Philips Wing, you can understand why.
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