The Three Trees

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Three Trees is Rembrandt's largest and most striking etched landscape. Here he masterfully combined techniques (drypoint, engraving, varied depths of etched lines, and a speckled tone) to create a sense of nature in flux. He animated the landscape with many details: an artist sketching on the hill at right, a fisher couple at lower left, and an amorous couple hidden in the darkened foreground bushes. Some of the unnatural cloud formations left of center indicate that Rembrandt may have etched The Three Trees on a plate that contained an abandoned sketch for The Death of the Virgin, a composition he continued on a larger plate in 1639.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art