When the needle is pulled at an angle of about 30° 

 to 60°, a very perceptible furrow of copper burr is 

 thrown up on one or both sides of the line on the 

 plate. This burr holds more ink than the clear 

 channel and prints with a highly distinctive inky 

 richness. Basically, etching removes metal from the 



FIGURE n 



Detail of Landscape with a hay barn and a 

 flock of sheep, bottom right, showing 

 rich drypoint lines with burr. En- 

 larged 10 times. (Smithsonian 

 photo 59386.) 



plate entirely, whereas drypoint displaces it in furrows 

 of burr. The rich fuzzy line produced by the burr 

 is what we most typically associate with drypoint 

 work. The first sort, the thin distant line, is never- 

 theless just as truly drypoint as the latter and is 

 distinguishable by itsforcefulness and clear direction.-'' 

 The same line may also be created, with slightly more 

 work, by using a scraper to remove the burr from a 

 rich drypoint line. 



Another way of making lines in a plate is with a 

 burin — an instrument with a sharp triangular point — 

 which is pushed through the copper, instead of being 

 pulled, as is the drypoint needle. When used con- 

 ventionally, the burin produces a very characteristic 

 hard, controlled printed line, one which does not 

 appear in this print. When used lightly, however. 



its line is virtually indistinguishable from that of the 

 vertical drypoint needle. It is quite po.ssible that 

 Rembrandt used the burin in some of his work on 

 this and other prints, but it seems a somewhat less 

 likely tool than the drypoint. First, the non-etched 

 lines in this print seem to have a more freely moving 

 quality than could probably be produced with a burin, 

 a rather stiff, if extremely precise tool. Second, when 

 Rembrandt was commissioned in 1665 to engrave a 

 portrait expressly with a burin, he found himself 

 unable to do so.-' His inability, however, may be 

 attributed as easily to Rembrandt's artistic inde- 

 pendence as to his inexperience with the burin. Rem- 

 brandt's general use of the burin has been widely 

 accepted. The question may not be that simple. 

 These visible differences, then, enable us to separate 

 the kinds of line within this print. 



The author has attempted, by tracing only the 

 etched lines in the print, to recreate the state of the 

 plate after Rembrandt's etching and before the 

 application of drypoint (figure 12). It can be seen 

 that Rembrandt's etched lines form only a foundation 

 or skeleton for the finished work. It is in no sense 

 complete in itself. More important, the picture 

 lacks all the rich contrasts of light and shade which 

 distinguish this print and most of Rembrandt's 

 finished work. 



It has been generally assumed that Rembrandt 

 went through a fairly normal process of stopping- 

 out and also re-etching in the course of his print- 

 making. The visual evidence would indicate that 

 he did not follow this procedure here. Stopping-out 

 is, of course, a means of creating variations in the 

 printed intensity of etched lines. After a plate has 

 etched for a certain time — depending on the artist's 

 inclination — it may be removed from the acid and 

 some of its lines covered with a stop-out varnish, 

 similar in texture and acid resistance to the basic 

 ground. The plate is then put back in the acid and 

 the remaining lines etched more deeply. This can 

 be repeated any number of times, giving a wide range 

 of intensity to the various etched lines. No such 

 wide range of etched lines appears in the finished 

 print. Further, where the edge of applied stop-out 

 varnish crosses a single line, the change in depth of 

 acid biting at that point is readily visible. Again, no 

 such change of depth of a single line is visible here. 

 The inference, unless attributed to very long coin- 

 cidence, seems probable that Rembrandt used only 

 a single acid etch on the entire plate, with no stopping- 

 out. 



102 



BULLETIN 250: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 



