?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN Landscape with a Milkman.
Etching and drypoint, circa 1650. 66x175 mm; 2 3/4x7 inches. Biörklund's second state (of 2), with the landscape added upper left; Usticke's second state (e) (of 2); White and Boon's second state (of 2). With thread margins or trimmed on the plate mark. A superb, early impression of this extremely scarce etching, with richly-inked burr throughout, particularly on the man, dog and grass tufts lower right, on the clump of trees at the center and on the water lower left.
We have found only approximately 12 other impressions at auction in the past 25 years.
This scarce landscape etching relates to a pen and ink drawing by Rembrandt from around 1650, Farm Buildings beside a Road, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Benesch 1227). Rembrandt likely made the drawing en plein air, at a farmstead on the outskirts of Amsterdam, and created the current etching from this drawing, and perhaps parts of other sketches, back in his studio. It is one of only two known landscape etchings by Rembrandt for which there exist what appear to be "preparatory" studies (the other is the Goldweigher's Field, 1651, Bartsch 234).
While no lifetime records exist which indicate that Rembrandt made any of his landscape etchings outdoors, on the spot, the 18th century collector and art historian Edmé-François Gersaint wrote that Rembrandt made one of his most celeberated landscape prints, Six's Bridge, etching, 1645 (Bartsch 208), on a sketching trip outside of Amsterdam while his servant was fetching mustard for him for lunch from the local village. Recent scholarship has shown that several other landscapes were likely drawn onto prepared etching plates by Rembrandt while he was sketching outdoors. These landscape etchings share an immediacy and spontainety with Landscape with a Milkman which suggest that all of them may well have been started by the artist outdoors and completed in the studio--mainly with additional drypoint work--with the aid of drawings that were also made on the spot or that Rembrandt had created during previous sketching forays into the countryside around Amsterdam. Bartsch 213; Biörklund 50-2; Hollstein (White and Boon) 213.
