In the Berlin Gallery are two small examples of _Holland Landscape with the Hamlet of Rhenen_. They are by Hercules Seghers, whom Bode points to as the father of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape. Similar in general design, they are distinguished by a fine sweep of almost clear sky, swimming with vapor, from which a level country, dotted with the roofs and church towers of a hamlet and threaded by a stream, stretches in pale-yellow tones, broken up with brownish shadows, to the foreground. The identification of the scene and the assignment of these pictures to Seghers have been made possible by comparison with some etchings of the same artist that modern Dutch research has discovered. By the same means other pictures, including a _Landscape_ in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which used to be attributed to Rembrandt, have been restored to Seghers. This one again shows a plain, intersected by a stream, but bounded on the right by the abrupt shoulder of a mountain, whose top is merged in dark cloud, while the rest of the sky is an open expanse of whitish light. In the contrast of this with the dark tones of the ground, weirdly interspersed with fitful gleams, there is an extraordinary impressiveness. It is no wonder that it was mistaken for a Rembrandt; and the interest in Seghers deepens when it is ascertained that Rembrandt himself was strongly influenced during his earlier years in Amsterdam by the older artist. This has been proved by a comparison of certain of the etchings of the two men. Hercules Seghers, in fact, seems to have been in his own day very much what Michel was to the modern revival of landscape-painting in France. He was a forerunner of the later movement, but unrecognized by the world, while almost the only records that exist of him are documentary evidences of debts. He was born in 1590, probably in Haarlem; worked in Haarlem, Utrecht, and The Hague, but chiefly in Amsterdam, where he died about 1640. In the few examples of his work that still survive, we can trace the twofold tendency of Dutch landscape: in one direction its note of simple truthfulness to the facts of nature, and in the other the tincture of these facts with a romantic spirit. And, in addition to thus setting the motive, Seghers proclaimed the Dutch artist’s fondness for effects of sky, for tonalities of grays and browns, sparingly enlivened with greens.