Landscape with Three Gabled Cottages Beside a Road

Throughout his long career, Rembrandt produced more than three hundred prints, developing a technique so varied and intricate that he is universally recognized as revolutionizing printmaking as an art form. His later landscape prints are open-ended images in which skies are predominately white, terrain is flat, and very little happens to interrupt the picturesque calm of the scene. Neatly contained by a gently arched frame at the top, Landscape with Three Gabled Cottages is both a careful portrait of rural cottages and an intimate expression of a local scene. Similarities to the motifs of the foreground tree, the cottages, and the road-which is wide and dark in front and narrows as it winds toward the horizon- appear in two Rembrandt drawings (AMAMA 1967.44 and 1952.31) that depict a property on the Sloterweg River near Amsterdam and which may have served as inspiration for this etching.

This print is known in three states. The dramatic light and dark areas of the first state, described with rich areas of drypoint, are transformed in the second and third states with shading and cross- hatching alterations and additions. The AMAM's beautiful impression of the third state clearly demonstrates the overall tonal harmony Rembrandt sought to achieve throughout the landscape, with a careful balance of etched details and velvety drypoint lines visible throughout the foliage.

The AMAM's Three Gabled Cottages was formerly in the collection of John Webster (1810-1891), a Scottish collector known for his distinguished group of Rembrandt landscape etchings. It passed to the New York banker Albert W. Scholle (d. 1910) and was eventually acquired by the German-born entrepreneur and pharmaceutical researcher Max Kade (1882-1967), who immigrated to New York in 1905. At his death in 1967, the Max Kade Foundation gave the AMAM an outstanding collection of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings by Dürer , Heinrich Aldegrever, Martin Schongauer, and others. The gift transformed the museum's print holdings, enabling faculty and museum staff to teach both survey courses and in-depth seminars.