Rembrandt: The Three Trees Matted Print

From the Morgan's own collection, this striking landscape by Rembrandt is reproduced in the lovely matted print.

Between 1900 and 1906, J. Pierpont Morgan amassed one of the finest collections of Rembrandt’s etchings. Morgan’s passion for the artist reflects the renewed interest in Rembrandt’s work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Morgan’s acquisitions remain at the core of the museum’s collection, which contains multiple states of most of Rembrandt’s approximately three hundred known etchings, including many rare impressions.

Morgan purchased his first Rembrandt etchings in 1900 from industrialist Theodore Irwin Sr. and acquired a second group in 1906 from George W. Vanderbilt, grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the wealthiest men in US history. The commodore came from humble beginnings: His great-great-great-grandfather Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt immigrated around 1650 as an indentured servant from the Dutch Republic to the colony of New Netherland, which included New Amsterdam, today New York City. Rembrandt never visited New Netherland, though he surely knew about the Dutch colony. He could hardly have predicted that centuries later, his work would hang here, a vital record of our shared histories.