Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Rembrandt’s “The Three Trees” (1643) is an etching of weather, labor, and revelation. At first glance it seems like a straightforward Dutch landscape: a low river in the foreground, a broad plain crisscrossed by fields and ditches, a distant city fringe, and on a small rise to the right, three trees standing close as if conversing. But the sky turns the scene into drama. Dark masses sweep in from the left, rain slants diagonally across the plate, and the dome of cloud above is worked with whorls and crosswinds that look audible. The result is not only a description of a place near Amsterdam; it is a portrait of the world when weather becomes theater and light chooses what to touch.
The Subject as a Meeting of Earth and Air
Rembrandt constructs the landscape from two protagonists: ground and sky. The ground is mapped in deep, velvety blacks—banks, bushes, the hill that holds the three trees—cut by paths of middle value where fields open and water reflects. The sky is a contrary realm of pale paper and restless line. It carries the whole range of meteorological narrative: drifting cloud, vertical rain, and the swept, circular motions that carve wind into air. The three trees mediate between these realms. They root the black earth and thrust themselves into the cloud’s light, their foliage catching the last brightness before the squall.
Composition and the Diagonal Weather
The plate’s most forceful geometry is the weather diagonal. From the cloud bank at the upper left, fine parallel lines fall toward the central plain like cords of rain. This oblique drives the eye across the breadth of the print and creates pressure against the right-hand hill where the trees stand. The trees counter with their own upward diagonals—trunks leaning, branches splayed. Ground and sky become a set of vectors in dialogue: the storm pushes; the hill and trees resist. That push-pull animates the entire landscape without a single human gesture.
Etching, Drypoint, and Plate Tone as Weather Instruments
“The Three Trees” is a masterclass in intaglio. Rembrandt uses etched line for the scaffolding of the scene—the distant horizon, the outlines of trees and banks—and adds drypoint burr in critical places to thicken darkness and give it a soft, furry edge. Most decisive is his use of plate tone: instead of wiping the copper clean before printing, he leaves a film of ink that tints the sky and land in different densities. Where the plate is wiped more thoroughly—around the trees’ crowns, in the middle sky—the paper gleams like a clearing. Where ink remains dense—left cloud, foreground bank—the tone turns to night. Because the film can vary from impression to impression, each print stages a different weather, and Rembrandt embraced those variations as part of the artwork’s expressive spectrum.
The Trees as Characters
Each tree has a personality. The left trunk leans slightly and sprouts a broader canopy, open to light; the middle tree stands more erect, its crown dense; the right tree is sparer, its branches knobbed and thrusting. Together they read like a small society—older and younger, talkative and reserved—bound by shared soil. Their shadows fuse into one mass at the base, grounding them in a single hill that rises from a sea of etched textures. Rembrandt refuses botanical fussiness; instead, he draws the way trees feel in wind: weighty at the base, quick at the tips, the canopy a conversation of soft and crisp strokes.
Human Presence at Landscape Scale
Look long enough and people appear. A cart rolls along a track at the lower left, its driver a dot; anglers sit with poles near the riverbank; tiny figures walk the far fields; a couple, barely an arabesque, stands on the hill behind the trees; in some impressions, a lightning bolt threads the clouds, and the silhouette of a draftsman may be seen at the left, a playful self-reference. These miniatures tie the epic weather to daily life. The storm does not pause for labor; labor does not pause for the storm. Rembrandt’s human figures are not anecdotal decorations; they are scale bars that measure the world’s vastness.
Light as Revelation
Light in this etching is not uniform; it is an event. The brightest field is the clearing behind and to the right of the trees, a broad wedge of paper-white that appears after our eyes have crossed the rain. That clearing is more than meteorology; it is revelation, a region where sight relaxes and breath comes easier. The trees sit on the edge of that grace, half in it, half still shaded. The distant city at left remains under the squall, its church spires and roofs a line of tone rather than detail. Rembrandt’s distribution of light makes a philosophy: illumination arrives locally, with force, and it does not flatten differences. It chooses.
Sound, Smell, and the Sensorium of the Print
Although silent, the plate hums with implied sound. The diagonal rain is a seethe; the trees’ crowns carry a rustle; the river tucks a faint mutter into the foreground. There is the distant clop of a cart, the call of unseen birds, and the particular hush that arrives before heavy weather breaks. Even smell seems drafted into the print: wet earth, leaf-sap, the metal scent of rain. Rembrandt achieves this sensory atmosphere through graphic means—densities of line, the grain of plate tone, the direction of hatching—so that the viewer’s body reads weather as surely as the eye reads form.
The Hill as Pulpit and Threshold
The small rise that hosts the trees is a pulpit of earth. It lifts them into dialogue with the sky and makes a threshold between near and far. Without this hill the plate would be a broad, horizontal plain; with it the landscape gains a vertical accent and emotional fulcrum. The path that climbs the slope and crests behind the trees offers narrative: travelers pass, lovers meet, a solitary figure pauses to look. That story need not be specified; its possibility gives the landscape human temperature.
The Distant City and Dutch Self-Recognition
On the horizon, low and continuous, lies a city: a line of rooftops, mills, and church towers. This is not a romantic ruin but a thriving Dutch settlement seen across reclaimed fields. The inclusion registers national pride without propaganda. The Netherlands in Rembrandt’s day was a republic that wrested arable land from water and traded across seas; its cities were engines of culture and wealth. By placing a living city under dramatic weather and across from working fields, Rembrandt proposes a balanced world in which nature’s power and human industry share the stage.
Theological Climate Without Emblem
Because Rembrandt often infuses his images with spiritual resonance, viewers sometimes seek explicit religious iconography. Here none is needed. The print’s theology is in the climate: darkness gathering, light breaking, rain stitching sky to earth, trees standing as faithful witnesses. The three trees have invited symbolic readings—Trinity, Calvary—but the etching never insists. Its religion, if we must name it, is a humility before forces larger than us and an affection for the labor that persists within them.
The Rhythm of Lines and the Breath of Air
Etched lines in “The Three Trees” breathe. In the sky they sweep in arcs that register wind eddies; in the rain they march in strict diagonals; in the trees they cluster and separate like leaves shaken and settled; in the water they lie horizontal, barely broken by ripples. This orchestration creates the sensation of air circulating through the plate. Rembrandt’s line is not a mere contour; it is a weather system whose currents the viewer can feel by following direction and weight.
Plate Variants and the Performance of Printing
Because the plate was inked and wiped by hand, no two impressions are identical. Some are so dark at the left that the rain becomes a curtain; others reveal the fine structure of distant clouds. In some impressions Rembrandt strengthened passages with drypoint burr that later wore away; in others he allowed more plate tone at the lower right to deepen the ground. This variability is not a flaw; it is a performance. The printer, perhaps Rembrandt himself, conducts the mood of each print to suit the day. Collectors learned to read these differences as seasons of the same landscape.
The Viewer’s Place and the Path of Looking
Where do we stand? At the lower left bank, level with the water and under the slant of rain. Our eye traces the diagonal, crosses the plain, reaches the trees, and rests in the clearing. The print choreographs a pilgrimage from storm to light. It is not sentimental; the rain remains, the storm does not vanish. But the viewer experiences transition: the psyche walks from pressure to reprieve. That journey is why the etching feels larger than its physical size.
Comparisons Within Rembrandt’s Landscapes
Rembrandt etched and drew many landscapes: cottages by ditches, clumps of trees, thatched barns, travelers on roads. “The Three Trees” is often singled out as his most dramatic because it fuses the intimacy of local detail with a sublime sky more commonly found in later Romantic art. Unlike the picturesque arrangements of some contemporaries, Rembrandt’s landscapes seldom prettify. They are observed, lived in, and often anchored by work—the cart and anglers here being typical. In this plate the sublime does not erase the everyday; it crowns it.
The Moral of Labor Under Weather
The small workers and anglers scattered across the fields are not merely scale devices; they are a moral. The world changes overhead, and still people must fish, drive, walk, and watch. The print honors that continuity. Dutch viewers would have recognized themselves as a people accustomed to marrying labor to weather—timing harvests to sky, defending lowlands from water. Rembrandt’s landscape therefore reads as a tribute to resilience without cliché. The storm threatens, light returns, we work.
Darkness as Space, Not Blankness
The lower left and upper left corners are heavy with ink, but they are not opaque voids. Look closely and you will find gradations, faint textures, even forms half-lost. Rembrandt treats darkness as space filled with potential rather than as an abyss. This practice is consistent with his paintings, where shadow is a living medium from which light draws shape. In “The Three Trees,” that philosophy gives the storm a body; it is not a painted mask but a moving mass with edges and depths.
Birds, Bolt, and the Small Dramas
High in the pale sky a string of birds veers, their marks tiny chevrons. In some impressions a lightning bolt zips from cloud to horizon, barely more than a scratched zigzag. These notations enlarge the scale of the story. Birds stitch together air and distance; lightning stitches together sky and ground. Both are minutes-long events folded into a composition that otherwise feels geologic. Rembrandt relishes such small dramas because they give the landscape pulse.
Time of Day and the Hour’s Emotion
Is it late afternoon or early evening? The clearing to the right suggests a sinking sun; the deepening tone at left implies a bank of weather moving in from the sea. The hour matters because it colors emotion. The landscape seems to be bracing for a night shower, or savoring the minute before rain thickens. That ambiguity is deliberate; Rembrandt wants the print to hover between anticipation and memory, like a chord held without resolution.
Why the Etching Endures
“The Three Trees” endures because it turns a local scene into a universal experience. Anyone who has watched a storm shoulder across a field recognizes the truth of its weather. Anyone who has carried on with work under shifting skies feels the rightness of its tiny figures. By coordinating line, tone, and composition, Rembrandt builds a landscape that is both exact and symbolic, particular and mythic. The trees do not stand for a doctrine; they stand for steadfastness. The rain is not allegory; it is rain. And still, in these facts, revelation stirs.
Conclusion
Rembrandt’s 1643 etching is less a picture of three trees than a symphony orchestrated around them. The weather diagonal drives across the plate; the hill offers resistance; the trees mediate earth and sky; labor persists in the fields; light opens a clearing. Etching, drypoint, and plate tone collaborate to make air palpable and shadow alive. Human beings appear as tiny, sturdy presences; birds and perhaps lightning act as fleeting messengers. What results is a landscape that teaches the eye to travel from storm to light, from pressure to breath, without denying either. Few works of printmaking combine technique and feeling so completely, which is why “The Three Trees” remains a touchstone—not only for Rembrandt’s landscapes but for the very idea of weather made visible.