Size of the original etching, 4¾ × 12⅝ inches
Rembrandt. Landscape with a Milkman
This etching, like The Wood over Palings, has velvety dry-point in the foliage, and may have suggested 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.
Size of the original etching, 2⁹⁄₁₆ × 6⅞ inches
And so the series comes to an end, and landscape disappears from the master’s work, save as a background to figure-compositions. One of these backgrounds may be noticed for its special interest. About 1653 Rembrandt took up a copperplate already etched by Hercules Seghers—a Tobias and the Angel (after a composition of Elsheimer’s)—and transformed it into a Flight into Egypt. Suppressing the two figures, which were of very large size in proportion to the design, he masked the traces of them by a mass of trees, put in his own figures on a much smaller scale, and by the most vigorous use of the dry-point wrought the whole into harmony. The treatment of shadowy masses of foliage reminds us how little there is of this element of landscape in the etchings we have been considering. There is nothing of that feeling for the majesty and mystery of leafy forest-trees which Claude expressed so beautifully in the Bouvier etching, and still more in his sepia drawings. Critics have also remarked on other limitations of landscape interest in Rembrandt—the absence of seas and water in movement, the comparative absence of wind and weather, in his etchings.
For all that, when we think of the other Dutch etchers of landscape, we realize how far he towers over those who professed no other subject,—over Molyn. Ruysdael, Everdingen, Waterloo, and Italianizers like Both.
Hercules Seghers is the one who showed most variety and temperament; and his work evidently had a great interest for Rembrandt. He was a curious experimenter, and though he rarely seems quite master of his intentions, he was the antithesis of those landscape artists, so frequent, who “take out a patent,” as has been said, for some particular corner or aspect of nature, and never do anything else but repeat their favorite theme with variations.
With Rembrandt landscape was a kind of interlude and holiday from more serious design. We feel it in the sunny temper which pervades the majority of the etchings. But how far superior he is to all the rest in his sensitiveness to beauty! As we have seen, he is not greatly interested in the details of landscape form. We find scribbles and shapelessness in his foliage and plants; but his grasp of essential truths overrides all criticism of this kind, and always and everywhere we feel his intense joy in expressing light. The etchings of his contemporaries seem cold and hueless, without air or sun, beside his.
I find it hard to express a preference among the series. The Three Trees stands by itself, but there are others which touch one with a more vivid charm. Turning from one to another, I find each arresting the eye with some particular beauty, though the set of oblong plates, from the Cottage and Hay-barn to the Gold-weigher’s Field, contain, I think, the most delight; they are those in which all Holland seems to lie before us, with its pastures and its many peaceful waters.