Cottage with a white Paling

This is one of the most charismatic landscapes in Rembrandt's printed oeuvre, offered here in a very fine impression of the third state. The white boarded fence, which gives the print its title and creates an almost abstract pattern, is unforgettable, and Rembrandt must have felt this when he saw it on his wanderings around Amsterdam. The place has been identified as the Spaarndammerdijk and, as Erik Hinterding suggests, the windmill in the background may have been one of the mills at the Haarlemmerpoort (Hinterding, 2008, p. 434). The main motif, apart from the fence, is a humble cabin at the edge of a small lake left behind by an earlier breach of the dyke. The building is surrounded by a couple of tall trees and some lower shrubs, and behind it we see the top of a tall haystack.
The Cottage with a white Paling is one of the very few etchings for which a very closely related preparatory drawing exists, which is today at the Rijksmuseum. It seems that Rembrandt sketched this scenery on the spot, but then elaborated the drawing in the studio, as it '... displays the full range of Rembrandt's dexterity with the pen, from the delicate quill strokes in the leaves and background to the bold, horizontal accents in reed pen in the foreground.' (Schneider, 1990, no. 11, p. 95) It is very unlikely that he would have completed so elaborate a drawing outdoors, in particular as a narrow strip of paper has been added to the lower edge of the sheet to enlarge the composition. Although the main elements of the image are clearly present in the drawing, including the cart and the figure by the water, Rembrandt made some changes in the execution of the etching: he seemingly stepped back and widened the focus, thereby giving more space to the foreground and to the sky above, and added some picturesque details, such as the ducks, the cows on the dyke, the windmill in the far distance and the animal skull at lower right - the latter being a traditional symbol of transience.