AUGUSTIN HIRSCHVOGEL. LANDSCAPE
Size of the original etching, 5⅝ × 8½ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
The etchings of Augustin Hirschvogel are even simpler in treatment than those by Altdorfer. They bear dates from 1545 to 1549. The more one studies his landscape plates, breathing the spirit of the true nature lover, the more fascinating do they become. He has eliminated all non-essentials, concentrating his attention upon what were to him the most significant features, and in this respect he may have influenced the work of more than one nineteenth century master.
Hans Sebald Lautensack, who was some twenty years Hirschvogel’s junior, was born in Nuremberg about 1524. The greater number of his landscape plates fall within the years 1551 and 1555. He is neither so simple nor so direct as Hirschvogel, and his plates suffer from over-elaboration. In an attempt to give a complete representation of the scene the value of the line is lost, and, in the majority of cases, the composition is lacking in repose.
For almost a century we have no landscape etchings of prime importance. Then, in 1640, Rembrandt appears on the scene with his View of Amsterdam, the first of a series of twenty-seven masterpieces which, beginning with this plate, comes to an end with A Clump of Trees with a Vista (1652). The View of Amsterdam is, among Rembrandt’s landscapes, comparable to the portrait of himself leaning on a stone sill, inasmuch as it is, in its own simple linear mode, a model of what etching can be at its best.
As in the case of all these etchings, with the exception of the Three Trees and the Landscape with a Ruined Tower and Clear Foreground, the sky is left perfectly blank, and our imagination must supply the quiet sunshine of a cloudless day or that delicate grayness which makes Holland a perpetual delight to the painter.
The Windmill (1641) is Rembrandt’s first dated etching. It is truly a portrait of a place, not only in its outer aspect, but in that inner spirit which, if it be present, moves us so profoundly, as in the case of Meryon’s etchings of Paris and Piranesi’s plates of ancient Roman edifices; or, if it be absent, leaves us disappointed and cold. In the Windmill, “we feel the stains of weather, the touch of time, on the structure; we feel the air about it and the quiet light that rests on the far horizon as the eye travels over dike and meadow; we are admitted to the subtlety and sensitiveness of a sight transcending our own; and even by some intangible means beyond analysis we partake of something of Rembrandt’s actual mind and feeling, his sense of what the old mill meant, not merely as a picturesque object to be drawn, but as a human element in the landscape, implying the daily work of human hands and the association of man and earth.”[12]
[12] Rembrandt’s Landscape Etchings. By Laurence Binyon. The Print-Collector’s Quarterly. Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 414.
