Gerard (Gerhard) Seghers (Zegers) was born in 1591 in Antwerp, where he died in 1651. He studied with Abraham Janssens and became a master in 1608/09. Between 1611 and 1620 he lived in Italy, where he was employed in Naples by Cardinal Zapata y Mendoza. He painted in the style of the Caravaggists, like Bartolomeo Manfredi and Gerard Honthorst. Between 1624 and 1626 he was probably in Utrecht. There he could have met Joachim von Sandrart, the author of his biography, which praised him as an excellent painter: “ein fürtrefflicher Mahler”. He spent a short time in Spain, where he was summoned by the Spanish king, who conferred the title of court painter on him. In the mid-twenties of the 17th century he returned to his birthplace, joined the “Rubenists” and abandoned the caravaggesque style. Seghers’ canvases are mostly large. The backgrounds of his earlier works are kept in neutral colours, but after his return from Italy and under the influence of Rubens he began to fill the backgrounds with painted pillars and curtains. He took scenes from the Old and the New Testaments. He painted numerous altarpieces for churches in Belgium and in Cologne. He also depicted genre scenes (musicians, soldiers, card players). A considerable number of Seghers’ works have been destroyed or lost, some of them can be reconstructed from surviving prints.
Lit.: Domien Roggen-Henri Pauwels, Het caravaggistisch oeuvre van Gerard Zegers, Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis, XVI, 1955-56, pp. 255-301; Dorothea Bieneck, Gerard Seghers,1591-1651: Leben und Werk des Antwerpner Historienmalers, Flämische Maler im Umkreis der grossen Meister, Vol. 6, Lingen 1992; De Maere & Wabbes: Illustrated Dictionary, Vol. I and III, Brussels 1994.