REMBRANDT. THE WINDMILL
Size of the original etching, 5¾ × 8¼ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
REMBRANDT. THREE TREES
Size of the original etching, 8½ × 11 inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
To the same year belong the Landscape with a Cottage and Haybarn and Landscape with a Cottage and a Large Tree, two delightfully spacious plates. There is one etching in 1642, the Cottage with a White Paling, in which dry-point is judiciously used to give richness to the shadows.
To the following year, 1643, belongs the Three Trees, the most famous of Rembrandt’s landscape etchings. Note how Rembrandt has suggested the passing of a summer thunder-storm, the rain-charged clouds rolling away to the left, while from the right the returning sunshine bathes the composition in glory, making each freshly washed leaf and blade of grass sparkle in its beams. Even the hard, slanting lines of rain in the upper left portion of the plate have their purpose, affording a needed contrast to the swiftly changing clouds, which the freshening breeze drives before it over the peopled plain and the far-reaching sea in the distance.
In 1645 there are five landscape etchings. If the Three Trees is Rembrandt’s most elaborate plate, Six’s Bridge is, in some ways, his most learned performance. According to tradition, it was etched “against time,” for a wager, at the country house of Rembrandt’s friend, Jan Six, while the servant was fetching the mustard, that had been forgotten, from a neighboring village. There is, however, nothing hasty or incomplete about it. It is, to use Whistler’s words, “finished from the beginning,” beautifully balanced, not a line wasted, of its kind a perfect work of art.
There are no more landscapes until 1650, a good year, since it gives us eight plates, every one worthy of the most serious consideration. Rembrandt by this time apparently had become dissatisfied with the relatively limited range of light and dark obtainable by the pure etched line, and from now onwards he relies more and more upon dry-point to obtain his effects, at times executing his plates entirely in that medium.
The Landscape with a Haybarn and a Flock of Sheep is one of the loveliest plates of this period. There is a brilliancy in the first state, a quiet harmony in the elaborated second state, which makes a choice difficult. Each, in its way, is of compelling beauty.