Landscape with Three Gabled Cottages Beside a Road

This print is a convincing blend of various sketches Rembrandt took along a canal running to the southwest out of Amsterdam. He observed the houses in one place, and the trees in another. The tree in the foreground at right fairly dominates the composition, the heavy drypoint foliage scratched into the plate directly over more delicate etched passages, some partly burnished out. The more delicately described farmhouses beneath would have housed both families and their livestock under the same roof.

Here as elsewhere, Rembrandt cannot resist adding a genre element to his scene: a group of villagers, old and young, form an intimate group before the door of the middle cottage, echoing the grouping of the houses. A woman with a hat and apron bends perhaps to offer food to some children, while, off to her right, a man urinates against the house.

(“Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings,” curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and presented at the Johnson Museum September 23–December 17, 2017)