Artwork story
About Mountain Valley with a Plateau
The artist and artwork
Hercules Segers made Mountain Valley with a Plateau around 1625–30 through line etching, drypoint, and marks struck with a metal punch. He printed this second state of two in blue-green ink on paper already prepared with a yellow-green ground, then colored the impression with a brush. Segers treated each impression as a new work rather than a standardized duplicate, earning his experiments the contemporary description “printed paintings.”
The world around it
Segers worked at the dawn of the Dutch Golden Age, when artists became celebrated for exacting views of daily life, ships, portraits, and landscapes observed from nature. He moved in the opposite direction. The Met calls him an artist of the imagination and notes that he probably never saw the rocky Alpine mountains he repeatedly pictured; he knew such terrain through landscape prints after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Printed images could therefore supply raw material for a place that never existed. His unconventional inks, colored papers, fabrics, grounds, and hand painting made every pull from a plate potentially different. Rembrandt admired him, owned one of his plates, and reworked it into another subject.
A detail to notice
The title’s plateau is not the tallest cliff. It is the inhabited shelf crossing the middle right, where tiny fields, trees, paths, and buildings hold their line beneath a dark wall of rock. A separate flat-topped formation stands at far left, framing a valley that opens toward the horizon. Above them, a huge yellow-green sky is barely interrupted by spare clouds. Blue-green printed marks can look like stone, vegetation, or shadow, while brushed color makes the paper itself behave like weather. In another impression, different ink and ground can alter time and mood without changing the plate. Segers made reproducibility serve variation, the opposite of what a print is expected to do.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Line etching, drypoint, and metal punch printed in blue-green, on a yellow-green ground, colored with brush; second state of two and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include sheet: 4 1/8 x 5 7/16 in. (10.5 x 13.8 cm).
Subject terms include Mountains and Landscapes. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1923.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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