Town with Four Towers

Hercules Segers was a painter of landscapes and still lifes, but today he is of interest to us because he was one of the most important experimenters in the history of European printmaking. Unlike Segers’s usual austere mountain panoramas, his seminal print "Town with Four Towers" is an attempt to reconcile his interest in vast mountain scenery with a landscape defined by human habitation. He combined native Dutch architecture with the tall spire dominating the town at the left. The spire is an allusion to the Church of Our Lady in Amersfoort, while the pedimented structure in the middle ground recalls the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato in Rome.

Segers hand-colored his impressions and cropped the images, creating a group of prints in which each is unique. There are nine known impressions of "Town with Four Towers," and seven impressions have been compared to the Art Museum’s work. The impression in London and three of the six impressions in Amsterdam are variants to the Art Museum’s, while the remaining three impressions in Amsterdam are significantly different. The Art Museum’s impression is printed in green, on paper prepared with an olive green.