Assistant-Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum
Author of “Dutch Etchers,” “Painting in the Far East,” etc.
THE pioneers of landscape art, those who have opened up new possibilities of design in landscape themes, were, at least until the nineteenth century, certain great masters of figure-painting. Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, each of these gave a fresh impulse to the painting of landscape, an impulse which even to-day has not lost its inspiration; while the conventions established by Claude, Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa seem by comparison tame and more or less artificial or demoded.
Of these masters Rembrandt is the nearest to modern feeling. The famous Mill, in which a landscape motive is treated with a richness and depth of humanity that hitherto had found expression only in figure-subjects, stands in this respect as a monument in European art.
Yet landscapes form a very small proportion of Rembrandt’s paintings. Rembrandt as a painter rarely seems to treat landscape for its own sake. He composes for the most part arbitrarily, using broad spaces of level and hill-masses with ruined towers as the material elements of a scene for which some visionary play of gleam and cloud seems the real motive in his mind, the counterpart of the emotions he sought to communicate and evoke.
We are now concerned with Rembrandt as an etcher. Here again the proportion of landscape to figure-subjects is small. There are seven and twenty out of a total of some three hundred etchings.
We note at once that the etched landscapes present a different aspect from the painted landscapes.
In his paintings Rembrandt shows none of the characteristics of the national landscape school of Holland, of those artists who relied on the features of their native land,—its wide pastures, its canals, its seaports, its sand-dunes, its farms, its great skies and immense horizons,—and made of the plain portraiture of these familiar scenes their pride and glory. Rather he took hints from his traveled countrymen and the painters who had sought the classic South. Landscape, whether treated simply or as an adjunct to some scene from Scriptural story, was to him a source of romantic appeal. And just as Italian masters, like Botticelli, have sometimes introduced as background foreign scenes from the Rhineland suggested by the work of Northern painters, so Rembrandt, to whom mountains had all the fascination of strangeness and romance, took from actual drawings of Titian’s school which he may have possessed or seen, or from pictures by traveled Dutchmen like Hercules Seghers, the features he desired, fusing them into a world of his own imagination.
The etchings, on the contrary, are for the most part pure Holland. Yet their inspiration is very different from that of the typical Dutch painter or etcher. They are not mere portraits of places. Even when apparently simple transcripts from the scene before the artist’s eyes, the composing spirit is at work in them, rearranging and suppressing. And perhaps just because of this absence of the literal topographical spirit, they seem to contain the essential genius and atmosphere of Dutch landscape.
Practically all Rembrandt’s landscape work belongs to the middle period of his life. Some writers have sought to account for this by supposing that he turned to such subjects in some rural retreat to soothe his overwhelming grief at the loss of his wife. The actual dates hardly support this supposition. Saskia died in the summer of 1642. But the landscapes begin a few years before that date. The first ten years of the master’s life at Amsterdam—the years of his prosperity—were, we know, crowded with portrait commissions; and landscape work would only have been a relaxation. It was hardly more than this at any time, but for some reason it interested him more during the ten or twelve years after 1640 than in his youth or old age.
The earliest date on a landscape etching is 1641; the latest, 1652. The undated plates can be placed with tolerable certainty within a year or so.