A Landscape with a Road near a Farmhouse among Trees

This is a copy after Rembrandt's drawing of the same subject in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, O. Benesch, op. cit., 1973, VI, p. 339, no. 1227, fig. 1528. As Peter Schatborn has kindly pointed out, the inscription on the verso is by the same hand as that on the recto of Rembrandt's preliminary study for his etching Cottage with a white Paling of 1648 (B. 232) in the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, P. Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, his anonymous pupils and followers, Amsterdam, 1985, pp. 68-9, no. 30. Schatborn (loc. cit.) describes the inscription as that of a 17th Century Collector, who generally noted the artist's name on the verso of his drawings. Often he would combine such inscriptions with his mark in the upper left or right corner on the recto, not found on either the Amsterdam or the present sheet, possibly because both have been trimmed (cf. P. Schatborn, 'Van Rembrandt tot Crozat. Vroege verzamelingen met tekeningen van Rembrandt'. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 32, The Hague, 1981, pp. 1-54). Rembrandt's similar drawing of a farm among trees from Chatsworth, Christie's, London, 6 July 1987, lot 14, now in a private Collection, shows a similar inscription verso and the collector's mark upper right recto (O. Benesch, op.cit., 1957, no. 1233). The dating of the inscription and the stamp of the Amsterdam art dealer J.P. Zoomer (1641-1724) make it almost certain that the present copy was done by a contemporary of Rembrandt, if not one of his pupils.