Seghers and his father bought a number of his works at the auction of the studio contents, as Pieter Lastman did.

[6] His posthumous reputation was boosted by the Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the High School of Painting) of Samuel van Hoogstraten, which presented him rather as a Romantic genius avant la lettre, lonely, poor and misunderstood, based mostly on his etchings.

Altogether only 183 known impressions survive from all his fifty-four plates and most are now in museums; the Rijksmuseum print room has easily the best collection.

Rembrandt collected both paintings (he had eight) and prints by Seghers, and acquired one of his original plates, Tobias and the Angel (HB 1),[7] which he reworked into his own Flight into Egypt (B 56), keeping much of the landscape.

He seems to have invented the "sugar-bite" aquatint technique, which was rediscovered in England over a century later by Alexander Cozens (it is also called lift-ground etching).

[10] The 1680 inventory of the collection of the marine painter Jan van de Cappelle, who owned five paintings by Seghers, describes one as a view of Brussels, which if correct would presumably mean Seghers traveled there, probably when young, when his style shows most Flemish influence (in so far as the chronology of his work is clear).