Gerard Seghers

Gerard Seghers (c. 17 March 1591 – 18 March 1651) was a Flemish painter, art collector, and art dealer. After a period of study and residence in Italy, he returned to Flanders where he became one of the leading representatives of the Flemish Caravaggisti movement. In his later career he abandoned the Caravaggist style and genre motifs to become an important painter of large altarpieces for local churches.

Life Gerard Seghers was born in Antwerp, where he was baptized on 17 March 1591. He was the son of innkeeper Jan Seghers and his wife Ida de Neve. Possibly he trained under Abraham Janssens, Hendrick van Balen or Caspar de Crayer (the father of the more famous Gaspar de Crayer).

In 1608, aged only 17, he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke.

He travelled to Italy where around 1611 he was in Naples working for the Spanish viceroy Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos. He later moved to Rome where he worked for Cardinal Antonio Zapata y Cisneros and the Spanish ambassador. He likely also met the Dutch and Flemish Caravaggisti residing in Rome such as Gerard van Honthorst, Dirck van Baburen, and Jan Janssens, and possibly also Hendrik ter Brugghen and Theodoor Rombouts. He is believed to have worked on commissions for, and sent his works, to the Antwerp art merchants Goetkint. Seghers further used his stay in Italy to continue his training as a painter and make copies after famous Italian paintings. He was back in Antwerp in the fall of 1620 and the following year he assisted Rubens in the decoration of the Saint Carolus Borromeus church of Antwerp. In 1621 Seghers married Catharina Wouters (d.1656) who came from a respected family. The couple would have eleven children of whom one, Jan Baptist (1624–1670), also became a painter.

In 1624 he became a consultor of the Sodality of the Married Men of Age ('Sodaliteit der getrouwden'), a fraternity of married men established by the Jesuit order. Seghers was appointed court painter to the Cardinal-Infante on 25 June 1637. It is possible that in the 1640s he spent some time in Amsterdam. Favourite themes were scenes of music making and card playing. The theme lent itself easily to genre treatment. Seghers was mainly interested in depicting people of flesh and blood, preferably in a moment of crisis which allowed the artist to paint their various facial expressions. The masked candle he used heightened the expressiveness and added a spiritual dimension. Many copies of his versions of this theme were produced by himself and his studio. The Flemish painter Michael Angelo Immenraet repeated one of Seghers's variation on the theme in his programme of decorative paintings on biblical themes he painted for the Unionskirche, Idstein in Germany.

While Seghers typically worked on a large scale, he also produced various works on a small scale and on copper for the export market or private use. These smaller works were often reduced copies or variations of his own works. Many of Seghers's compositions were engraved by Antwerp engravers such as Jacob Neefs, Paulus Pontius and Schelte a Bolswert. These prints have assisted in attributing a number of paintings that were deemed lost to Gerard Seghers.