Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, 1643. Etching with drypoint and engraving; the copperplate measures 21.4 × 28 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.
A reproduction of Rembrandt's The Three Trees came to me from a great-uncle. It hung in his flat for as long as anyone remembers. It is not an original and it never pretended to be.
I want to make an argument for that object, and it starts with an awkward fact about what it reproduces.
The original is already a multiple
The Three Trees, 1643, is not a painting. It is an etching, with engraving and drypoint worked into the same plate — three techniques on one small sheet of copper. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which holds an untrimmed impression, gives the plate as 21.4 × 28 cm. That is roughly a sheet of A5 turned sideways. Almost everyone who knows this picture knows it larger than it has ever been.
The plate at its own size, on a wall. The sideboard is 140 cm wide.
Rembrandt made prints because prints multiply. He printed them, sold them, reworked the plates and printed them again. An etching is a reproduction technology used as an original medium, and it was used that way on purpose, by a man who needed the money.
It gets less tidy from there rather than more. Around eighty of Rembrandt's copperplates outlived him. In the 1780s and 90s the French engraver Pierre-François Basan bought a large group of them and published editions printed from the artist's own plates, more than a century after his death; his son carried on after him. Those sheets are still called Basan impressions and they still come up at auction. So: a print pulled by Rembrandt is an original. A print pulled from Rembrandt's plate in 1790 is — what, exactly? The same copper, the same lines, a different hand at the press, worn where the burr has gone.
The clean line between original and reproduction does not survive contact with the object. It is a spectrum, and it always was.
What a reproduction was for
There is a history here that has been quietly forgotten, and it is not a history of cheapness. It is a history of education.
The Arundel Society was founded in London in 1849 — John Ruskin was among its members — with the declared purpose of promoting knowledge of the work of the old Italian, Flemish and other European masters. It did this by publishing chromolithographs and sending them to subscribers. Its audience could not travel to Assisi or Padua. The reproduction went to them instead. The society ran for nearly fifty years.
In Germany the same conviction produced the Kunsterziehungsbewegung around 1900, with its congresses in Dresden in 1901, Weimar in 1903 and Hamburg in 1905. Alfred Lichtwark, who ran the Hamburger Kunsthalle and understood a museum as a place of public education, was its central figure. Part of it was the Bilderschmuckbewegung: the argument that good reproductions on the walls of schools and ordinary flats would train the eye of a generation that would otherwise never see a good picture at all.
Half a century later André Malraux gave the idea its most famous name. The musée imaginaire — the museum without walls — was the observation that photographic reproduction had, for the first time, made the whole history of art comparable on one table. Not a substitute for the museum. A different instrument, capable of things the museum is not.
None of these people were embarrassed. The reproduction was not a consolation prize for those who could not afford the real thing. It was the instrument by which a person educated their eye, and hanging one was a statement about wanting to.
A shop in Interlaken
I should declare an interest. The picture came from my family, and my family sold multiples for a living.
The street in Interlaken before the First World War. On the awning, the sign of the shop's predecessor: Objets d'Art en Bois d'Olivier — G. Invernizzi-Fuchs.
In 1898 Albert and Martha Schild opened a shop at Bahnhofstrasse 19 in Interlaken, taking over the premises from a predecessor whose sign read Objets d'Art en Bois d'Olivier. They sold carved wooden figures, souvenirs, wooden toys, ceramics, tin toys, later Steiff bears. The name Fuchs came into the business by marriage, when a parson's son married the Schilds' eldest daughter — but the firm still trades under the founder's: Albert Schild AG.
My uncle outside the shop. Behind him in the window: carved bowls, turned wood, none of it unique, none of it apologised for.
It is still open, and my brother runs it now, in the fourth generation. Among the carved bowls and the Steiff bears he also sells prints from Museartis — which I should say plainly, since this is my shop writing about my family's.
That closes a circle I did not plan. For more than a century that counter has sold objects to people who could not take Interlaken home with them. It now also sells sheets of paper to people who cannot take the museum home either. It is the same trade, and it always was.
Nothing in that shop was ever unique, and nobody apologised for it. A carved bear is a multiple. A souvenir is an object whose whole purpose is to carry a place home for someone who cannot stay. That is not a lesser kind of object; it is a different job, and it can be done well or badly — which is the only distinction that has ever mattered. A reproduction does the same job for a picture.
So the sheet on the wall was never an embarrassment in that house.
What actually went wrong
Something did go wrong, and it is worth being precise about what, because the usual diagnosis is the wrong one.
What went wrong is not that reproductions exist. It is that printing became cheap enough that nobody had to be careful, and the careless ones became so common that they discredited the whole category. Walk into a furniture shop and you will find pictures that are wrong in ways that have nothing to do with being reproductions:
They are upscaled. A two-thousand-pixel scan enlarged in software will pass any preflight check at 300 dpi, because dots per inch is a relationship between a file and a size, not a property of the file. No information was added. The result is soft in a particular plastic way that you can see from two metres.
They are cropped to fit. The frame size was decided first and the picture trimmed to it — caption gone, margin gone, the artist's own handwriting gone, sometimes an inch of the composition gone.
They are printed from whichever photograph was cheapest. Every impression of an old print has faded differently, and the reds go first. Two museums holding the same woodblock print hold two different pictures. If nobody tells you which one you are looking at, nobody chose.
They are printed at an arbitrary size. The object's own scale — often the most surprising thing about it — is simply discarded in favour of a size that sells.
And they say nothing. No collection, no accession number, no scale, no measurement. Nothing you could check.
That is not a failure of reproduction. That is a failure of care, and it is entirely fixable.
The honest half of the argument
Detail at actual print size. The velvety black in the foliage is drypoint burr — the one thing no reproduction carries.
A reproduction is not the thing. That has to be said plainly or the rest is salesmanship.
What is lost in a print of The Three Trees is not small. The burr of the drypoint, which holds ink like velvet and wears away after a few dozen impressions. The plate tone the printer left or wiped. The particular paper, and how the plate embossed it. The fact that a hand pulled it, and that the hand made decisions. Those are not reproducible, and a pigment print on fine art paper does not reproduce them.
What it does carry is the drawing, the light, the composition, the storm coming in from the left — and, if whoever made it took the trouble, the object's real size. That is a great deal. It is what the Arundel Society was posting to its subscribers, and it was enough to build an education on.
So hang it, and say what it is
The convention we have inherited is a strange one: an original, however indifferent, confers status; a reproduction, however good, is slightly embarrassing. That gets it exactly backwards. The reproduction's only real fault is when it lies — when it is passed off, or when nobody will tell you what it is.
So: hang the reproduction. Choose a good one and learn to tell the difference, which takes about ten minutes of looking and one honest product page. Ask which collection, which impression, what size the original is and what fraction of it you are getting. Put those questions to whoever is selling it, and notice whether they can answer.
And then do not apologise for it. My great-uncle didn't. He hung three trees under a Dutch sky in a rented flat, and looked at them for forty years, and I suspect he saw more of that picture than most people who have walked past the copperplate in a vitrine.
We print The Three Trees in one size only, 35 × 27 cm, which puts the picture on paper at the size of Rembrandt's plate. The file would carry an enlargement; we did not make one, for the reason this piece is about.
Sources for the historical claims: the National Gallery of Art's catalogue record for The Three Trees (Rosenwald Collection, acc. 1943.3.9119) for the plate and sheet measurements; the standard accounts of the Arundel Society (London, 1849–1897) and of Pierre-François Basan's editions from Rembrandt's surviving plates; the German Kunsterziehungsbewegung with its congresses of 1901, 1903 and 1905; and the published history of Albert Schild AG, Interlaken. The Rembrandt image is public domain, published by the National Gallery of Art under its Open Access policy. The two Interlaken photographs are from the author's family. Museartis prints are also sold at Albert Schild AG, which is run by the author's brother.
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