REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn
(b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)

Landscape with Buildings

1642-46
Oil on panel, 45 x 70 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Catalogue number: Bredius 450.

Although Rembrandt used extensive landscape settings in several of his early biblical and, more particularly, mythological pictures, he only took up landscape painting proper for the first time in the late 1630s. (By this term is meant paintings in which the landscape is the main subject, not necessarily paintings without figures.) He probably produced fewer than a dozen landscapes in oils altogether and seems to have given up the practice after 1650. In drawings and etchings, his landscapes formed a higher proportion of the total but these too were confined to the middle twenty years of his career.

The Landscape with Buildings illustrated here is perhaps the most monumental of Rembrandt's landscape paintings, even though it is not physically large. It is also the most classical, and may be compared with Annibale Carracci's Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, painted in Rome about 1603, which Rembrandt might have known in a copy. In both paintings, the skyline is dominated by a mixed group of buildings, seen partly in sunshine and partly in shadow. These buildings are so fully integrated with the landscape that they seem almost like extensions of it, as if they were outgrowths of rock rising out of the hillside. The foreground is occupied by a placid river, which in the case of Rembrandt's picture is crossed by a low classical bridge.