Cottage with White Paling among Trees

Entry

Tucked away among trees and bushes, surrounded by a wooden fence or paling, is a small thatched cottage situated near a dike and a small inland lake, such as is still to be seen near the Zuiderzee dike. On a path at the left is a cart, and at the far right a man sits or leans against a small fence overlooking the water. Another man, now largely obliterated, emerges from behind the paling at the left (near the cart), comparable to the man peering around the corner in A Cow in a Shed (inv. no. RP-T-1930-59).

The landscape, in my view wrongly rejected as a copy by Benesch, was drawn with Rembrandt’s characteristic strong contrasts. The cart, foreground details and fencing on the extreme right were sketched in broad lines with a reed pen, while the branches of the trees and the leaves blowing in the wind were rendered with small loops and hatchings made with a fine pen. Rembrandt exploited the blank white paper to convey the brightly lit planks of the dilapidated wooden fence. A small strip of paper has been attached along the lower edge. Since this fragment has a few of Rembrandt’s original vertical reed pen lines and passages of wash, it suggests that the sheet was cut apart at some point, then reattached somewhat unsatisfactorily (with a few millimetres missing), possibly by Rembrandt himself. The crown of the largest tree and the man peering around the paling have been heightened or corrected with opaque white. The light greyish-purple wash is a later addition and can also be seen in other drawings by Rembrandt and his school, such as Tobias and the Fish, in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (inv. no. KKSgb2),⁴ and Rembrandt’s Trees Surrounding the Entrance to a Garden, in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg (inv. no. 39470).⁵

That the Amsterdam drawing was originally larger can be deduced not only from the reattached fragment on the lower edge but also from the etching of the same scene, in reverse, the Cottage with White Paling, which features more of the sky and foreground, as can be seen in an impression in the British Museum in London (inv. no. F,5.209).⁶ The relationship between the two works is exceptional, for there are hardly any other landscape drawings that have been used so directly for an etching. Martin Royalton-Kisch harbours some doubt about the attribution,⁷ hence its omission from our ‘core list’.⁸ The drawing is larger than the etching, so could not have been indented and transferred directly onto the copper plate. Rembrandt probably composed most of his landscape etchings in his studio, after having made plein-air landscape sketches in preparation. In this case, he used the drawing as a starting point, but nevertheless made some changes. He drew the top of the hayrick behind the cottage, thereby changing it into a farmhouse; he also added a dovecote to the roof, ducks in the water, a cow on the dike and a windmill on the horizon – all typical motifs of the Dutch countryside. In addition, he included a horse’s skull in the lower right corner of the etching, a symbol of vanity and transience. Thus, while the drawing is nothing more than a depiction of a slice of nature, drawn in situ, the etching is invested with an independent and more emblematic character through the addition of iconic Dutch landscape details. The actual site of the drawing was identified by Boudewijn Bakker as a cottage on the Spaarndammerdijk.⁹

The date on the third state of the etching was problematic for some years, but it is now read as 1648, so that the drawing can also be dated to the same year.¹⁰ It is, therefore, an important point of reference for Rembrandt’s chronology and was made in the same period as Daniel in the Lions’ Den (inv. no. RP-T-1930-17) and the View of the Amstel from the Blauwbrug (inv. no. RP-T-1890-A-2410), where the contrasts are admittedly more subtly indicated.

The inscription with Rembrandt’s name at the lower left was written by a seventeenth-century hand that has been tentatively identified by Jane Shoaf Turner as that of Dr Johannes Claesz Furnerius, the father of Rembrandt’s pupil Abraham Furnerius.¹¹ As Maud van Suylen noted, an identical inscription with Rembrandt’s name, written in the same hand, appears on the recto or verso of three drawings traditionally attributed to Rembrandt.¹² Two are from the important group of landscape drawings by Rembrandt assembled by Nicolaes Anthoni Flinck (the son of pupil Govert Flinck) and sold to William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire, for Chatsworth in 1723 (former inv. nos. 1040 and 1037), one of which is now in the John and Marine Fentener van Vlissingen Art Foundation¹³ and the other of which was later in the collection of Paul W.L. Russell, Amsterdam, and is now in the collection of Leon Black in New York.¹⁴ The third drawing with the same inscription is in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. no. C 1331).¹⁵ Such inscriptions are usually combined with a collector’s mark consisting of one or two Greek letters inscribed at the upper right in the same ink (L. 2942, L. 2943 and L. 2944), as is the case with all three of these drawings, but such a mark does not appear on our drawing. Since it may have been reduced in size, it is possible that such a mark was originally present at the upper right. The general reliability of Furnerius’s near contemporary inscriptions should dispel any lingering doubts about the attribution of this important study.

Peter Schatborn, 2017