The Hay-barn with Flock of Sheep (B. 224) is an instance of a favorite feature in Rembrandt’s landscape—a road seen in perspective at one side of the design. The Landscape with a Cow Drinking (B. 237) is a beautiful etching in a rather slight manner, with a suggestion of wind in the branches of trees, and light coming with the wind. Even in the Three Trees, though there is storm, there is little impression of movement in the air; and it is characteristic of the landscape etchings as a whole that they are serene and still, and more often suggest a sunny day than gray skies.
Dry-point becomes more emphatic in the Obelisk (B. 227); indeed, in the earliest impressions of this plate the black of the bur is too pronounced, and only after it had been printed from till this effect had merged and blended with the etched lines was the right effect attained. Here the obelisk gives character to the design; and in the Landscape with a Square Tower (B. 218) a building dominates,—an old tower of rather blunted outlines, such as Rembrandt loved to crown dark hills with in the visionary landscapes of his painting.
Another old tower occurs, less prominently, in the Farm with Trees and a Tower (B. 223), a long, oblong plate, of great beauty for its pattern of light and shade. Part of the sky is shadowed, and the last light, before a shower pours over the trees, illuminates the foliage on one side. In the first two states there is a small cupola on the tower; but Rembrandt, no doubt rightly, judged that the design would be improved by lopping it off. The change certainly subdues the local character of the scene.
Another long oblong of perhaps greater beauty is the Gold-weigher’s Field of 1651 (B. 234). This is all air and sun and space, the etched lines light and open, with dry-point adding a kind of gleam and vibration to the fertile fields. It is a revelation of what a great artist can do, unaided by tone or color, with a scene that to the average eye would be tame enough. There is a sense, too, of the riches of the earth, the farmer’s pride in broad acres and growing crops, which gives a human touch, never absent from Rembrandt’s work.
In contrast with this is another plate of the previous year—the Three Gabled Cottages (B. 217)—where the dry-point is freely used to give color and softness to the thatched roofs, checkered with the shadow of an old tree. But it is the gratefulness of shadow in the noonday, not its gloom, which is the motive of the etching.
The last group of landscapes are in pure dry-point. It is interesting to compare one of the earlier bitten plates with the Road by the Canal (B. 221), delicious in its freshness and spontaneous effect, or the Clump of Trees with a Vista (B. 222). Of this last there is a first state with a mere indication of part of the design; the trees, with the peep through the thicket, seem to have been an afterthought.
The Wood over Palings (B. 364), the principal one of several unfinished studies on one plate, has velvety dry-point in the foliage. It is a plate that seems to have served for inspiration to Andrew Geddes, the Scotch artist who was one of the first to inaugurate the revival of etching in the nineteenth century and to realize once again—what had been so unaccountably forgotten since Rembrandt’s time—the possibilities and beauty of the dry-point method.
Rembrandt. The Gold-weigher’s Field
“This is all air and sun and space, the etched lines light and open, with dry-point adding a kind of gleam and vibration to the fertile fields. It is a revelation of what a great artist can do, unaided by tone or color, with a scene that to the average eye would be tame enough. There is a sense, too, of the riches of the earth, the farmer’s pride in broad acres and growing crops, which gives a human touch, never absent from Rembrandt’s work.” Laurence Binyon.