Fogg Museum

The Three Trees, 1643, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. More

When Rembrandt set to work on his etching The Three Trees he used a copper plate that he had previously etched with an image of the Death of the Virgin. He burnished the image off partially, but left some trace of an angel hovering in the clouds overhead on the copper ground. To make The Three Trees, he flipped the plate 90 degrees. In the new etching’s top left corner there is a ghost impression, a record of the earlier imaged etched onto the plate. A careful look also reveals a fisherman and his wife, as well as a pair of lovers in the darkened bushes. Together with the gathering clouds, The Three Trees speaks to the changing landscape and humankind’s place in it.

Prints differ from other works of art in that they are usually multiples produced in editions. States are determined within editions each time a change is made to the plate. The ability to see an artist's process as an image evolves—evident in the Rembrandt example above—makes prints unique.

The print collection at the Fogg Museum spans more than 600 years, with works from the 15th century to the present. Its nearly 60,000 examples from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa have made the collection a core part of the Art Museums’ holdings. These works on paper include Italian engravings from the 15th through the 18th century, Dutch landscape prints from the 17th century (including works by Rembrandt), and French masterworks from the 17th through the 19th century, as well as works from Germany and Great Britain, and by artists from the United States such as Winslow Homer, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Barnett Newman.

The Fluxus collection includes important multiples from the 1960s, including works by such experimental artists as Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, and Christo. Kara Walker and Kiki Smith, among other artists represented in the collection who are working today, redefine the boundaries of graphic arts through the reinterpretation of traditional techniques. Recently developed mediums such as digital prints offer a new window onto the artist's process, and exist side by side with woodcuts, lithographs, screen prints, and etchings.