Rembrandt van Rijn: The Three Trees (Detail), 1643 – Porcelain Art Mug

Three trees on a rise, and above them a sky that took most of the work. Rembrandt drew the clouds with the etching needle, then went back into the plate with drypoint and the burin, and the diagonal rain falling across the top left corner was ruled in with a straightedge — the only ruled lines in the sheet.

It is his largest landscape print and the only one with weather in it. The storm is moving off to the left; the light is already back on the fields, where a herd is grazing and a town stands on the horizon. Small things are hidden in the plate: an artist sketching on the hillside at the right, a fisherman and his wife at the water's edge, a cart on the skyline, a pair of lovers in the bushes below the trees.

There is no title on the plate and no story attached to it. Rembrandt made it in 1643, the year after Saskia died, and it has been read as an allegory ever since; nothing in the sheet supports that, and nothing rules it out.

This mug carries a detail, not the whole plate: the three trees themselves, the ruled sky behind them, and the thicket below. The complete etching is shown in the last product image. A mug offers about nine centimetres of printable height — a wide landscape would shrink to a stamp on it, so what is printed here is the group that gives the plate its name.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, 1643. Etching with drypoint and engraving on laid paper, plate 21.4 × 28 cm, sheet 21.8 × 28.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection. Open access, public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.