REMBRANDT. THREE COTTAGES

Size of the original etching, 6¼ × 8 inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)

The Landscape with a Ruined Tower and Clear Foreground is, perhaps, of all these etchings the noblest and the most dramatic. In the sky to the left are piled thunder clouds. A faint breeze, the precursor of a coming storm, gently moves the upper branches of the trees. There is an expectant hush, a tenseness, and we are made to feel that in a few minutes the first heavy raindrops will be driving through the over-charged air. Otherwise all is still, the sky to the right being yet quiet and undisturbed. With the fewest etched lines Rembrandt has indicated the form and growth of the trees, adding, just where needed to give emphasis and enrichment, touches of dry-point, concentrating his richest blacks on the noble clump which shuts off the road leading toward the left. With such simple means, with black lines and white paper, he has given us by his art a more convincing record of one of Nature’s noblest spectacles than most painters, with a full palette at their command, could achieve in a lifetime of labor.

In the Three Cottages dry-point is used with magnificent effect. Early impressions of this masterpiece have a richness, a bloom, which is unmatched among Rembrandt’s landscape plates. A fine impression of the third state, with the added shading on the gabled end of the first cottage, represents the plate admirably. To be seen at its best, however, it should not be too heavily charged with ink, since the tree forms thereby are confused. Work such as this is so seemingly simple that one may readily overlook the power of analysis and the superb draughtsmanship it displays. Everyone who loves Rembrandt’s landscapes—and who that knows them does not love them?—must bitterly regret that at about this time, in the very plenitude of his powers, he saw fit to bring his landscape work to a close.

It is true that we have the Goldweigher’s Field of 1651—an unsurpassed masterpiece—and in the following year the Landscape with a Road Beside a Canal and A Clump of Trees with a Vista; but had he treated a landscape motive with the passion which breathes from the Three Crosses, Christ Presented to the People, or the Presentation in the Temple, how much richer and fuller would landscape art have been!

The Goldweigher’s Field, by tradition the country seat of the Receiver General, Uytenbogært, whose portrait Rembrandt had etched in 1639 (The Goldweigher), is, in point of suggestiveness, second to none of Rembrandt’s plates. The eye is gently led from field to fertile field, each with its own individual character and filled with interesting little details, and finally rests upon the quiet sea which stretches to the horizon.

Contemporary with Rembrandt, treating scenes essentially the same, a whole school of etchers produced an enormous number of plates, many of them charming, but none to be classed with the permanently great work in the history of the art.

REMBRANDT. GOLDWEIGHER’S FIELD