Size of the original etching, 5⅛ × 8⅝ inches
In the Collection of Howard Mansfield, Esq.
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
REMBRANDT. VIEW OF AMSTERDAM FROM THE EAST
Size of the original etching, 4⅛ × 5⅞ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
Whistler, “the greatest etcher and the most accomplished lithographer who ever lived” (according to Mr. Joseph Pennell), seems to have interested himself in landscape hardly at all. Not even his most ardent disciples would assert that the master’s few purely landscape plates contribute greatly to the pyramid of his fame. But even here one must tread softly. Whistlerium tremens is still a highly contagious disease; and has not his official biographer written “All his work is alike perfect”? How then may a modest lecturer presume to praise or compare? Let Mr. Pennell speak: “Look at Rembrandt’s prints made, I do not know whether with Amsterdam or Zaandam in the background, and then at Whistler’s of the same subjects. Rembrandt drew and bit and printed these little plates as no one had up to his time. But Whistler is as much in advance of Rembrandt as that great artist was of his predecessors. In these little distant views of absolutely the same subject, Whistler has triumphed. It is not necessary to explain how: you have only to see the prints to know it.... The older master is conservative and mannered; the modern master, respecting all the great art of the past, is gracious and sensitive, and perfectly free.”
“You have only to see the prints to know it.” Well, let us look at two of them: Rembrandt’s View of Amsterdam, of 1640, and Whistler’s Zaandam. “Why drag in Velasquez?” the master of the gentle art of making enemies is reported to have said, upon one historic occasion. This time, so far as landscape etching is concerned, may it not be Rembrandt’s turn to say, “Why drag in Whistler?”
LANDSCAPE ETCHING
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fine Prints. By Frederick Wedmore. 15 illustrations. Edinburgh: John Grant. 1905.
The Great Painter-Etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler. By Malcolm C. Salaman. Edited by Charles Holme. 191 illustrations. London, Paris, New York: The Studio. 1914.