View of Amsterdam from the Kadijk, copy

During his lifetime, Rembrandt's extraordinary skills as a printmaker were the main source of his international fame. Unlike his oil paintings, prints travelled light and were relatively cheap. For this reason, they soon became very popular with collectors not only within, but also beyond the borders of the Netherlands. His popularity led to Rembrandt being copied both within his lifetime and posthumously. This applies to this etching, which is plate 22 from William Ottley’s A collection of one-hundred and twenty-nine fac-similes of scarce and curious prints, by the early masters of the Italian, German and Flemish schools (London, 1828). 

A contemporary of Turner and Constable, Ottley combined being a notable artist of his period with being a pioneering art historian and Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. His reasons for choosing this print are not clear, but British art was renowned for its interest in the landscape and it was this that probably attracted Ottley more than Rembrandt's religious works or studies of beggars.

Because his father was a miller, Rembrandt must have enjoyed adding the windmill to View of Amsterdam, his first landscape print. The early 1640s marked a flurry of landscape activity for him in and around his adopted city. Several etchings reflect the area near the new house that he and his wife Saskia bought in Amsterdam in 1639. Then, after her death in 1642, he may have consoled himself by walking the countryside, with its picturesque old farmhouses. Scholars even speculate that, because Rembrandt ceased making self-portraits in etching around this time, he may have found in nature the sort of meditative self-reflection that he had previously found in self-portraiture.

The etching depicts a recognisable view (but in reverse) of the North East of the 'St. Anthonis Poort, outside the old bastion de Blauwhoofd'. Buildings include the Haringpakkerstoren, the Oudekerk, the Montalbaanstoren, the East and West Indian Dockhouses, the Mill on the Blauwhoofd and the Zuiderkerk. Rembrandt had sketched the local landscapes but his etchings of the subject matter were a new departure between about 1640 and 1652. Differences in technique among his landscape etchings and drypoints suggest that, just as he sketched in situ, he may have sometimes sketched directly onto his copper plates in drypoint or with an etching needle.

This etching was originally mounted in the so-called King George IV album of Old Master prints, which was purchased by the Dominion Museum in 1910. However, within a few years, James McDonald, art assistant, photographer and sometime acting director, had crudely removed all the Rembrandts (or copies) from the album, with view to their separate exhibition. They have not been returned to the album. Te Papa also owns an original impression from Rembrandt's plate (1971-0011-1).

 

References: New Hollstein Dutch 203, copy b; Hollstein Dutch 210, copy 4

 

Sources:

Minneapolis Institute of Art, https://collections.artsmia.org/art/42257/view-of-amsterdam-rembrandt-harmensz-van-rijn

V&A, Search the collections, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O517091/a-view-of-amsterdam-from-print-rembrandt-harmensz-van/

 

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   September 2017