This is the record for the sheet you bought: which original it comes from, how it was digitised, what we did to the file, and what we are allowed to sell. Nothing here is marketing. It is the paperwork.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), The Three Trees, 1643. Signed in the plate lower left: Rembrandt f. 1643
- Object
- Etching with drypoint and engraving on laid paper. Plate 21.4 × 28 cm, sheet 21.8 × 28.7 cm — an untrimmed impression with the platemark visible on all four sides
- Held by
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection
- Accession
- 1943.3.9119 (NGA object 11628). White/Boon 212, one state only; New Hollstein 214
- File
- NGA IIIF, 4671 × 3541 px native
- Crop
- [35, 26, 4607, 3486] px, ratio 1.3216
- Printed at
- 418 dpi at 35 × 27 cm
Which impression, and why this one
Rembrandt only ever made one state of this plate, so the variable is not the state but the paper and the wear. Most surviving impressions have been trimmed to the plate edge by collectors and mounters over three centuries. This one was not: the sheet runs 4 mm wider than the plate on each side and the platemark — the bruise the copper pressed into the damp paper — is visible all the way round. That is what you are getting, and it is why we crop just outside the platemark instead of just inside it.
Provenance is short and clean: bought by Lessing J. Rosenwald from Weitenkampt in 1928, given to the National Gallery in 1943.
The Metropolitan Museum holds a fine impression too (29.107.31) and publishes it as public domain. We could not use it: images.metmuseum.org sends no CORS headers, so the file cannot be fetched and composed in the browser. That is a delivery problem, not a rights problem — recorded here so nobody re-tries it.
What we measured
We found the platemark by taking column and row means across a 1600 px rendition. The paper reads about 205; the platemark shows up as a trough down to 176 on the left and 168 on the right, with the top and bottom leaving the paper plateau more gently. We set the crop just outside that trough, so the platemark line itself is reproduced rather than cut off — fractions [0.0075, 0.00742, 0.98625, 0.98433], native [35, 26, 4607, 3486].
That gives a ratio of 1.3216 against the catalogued 28 / 21.4 = 1.3084 — a 1.0 % difference, the same order as our Great Wave sheet, and about the width of an inked plate edge. Physical size is anchored on the catalogued plate width of 28 cm, so the printed image is 28.00 × 21.18 cm.
The National Gallery caps single-request IIIF delivery at 4096 px on the long side, so the file was fetched as four regions and reassembled in the browser with the tile boundaries computed from the destination pixels.
Why there is only one size
This is the one sheet in the catalogue whose size was decided on meaning rather than on pixels, and we would rather say so than let it look like a technical limit. The file would carry 39 cm of image at 300 dpi — a 50 × 40 cm sheet at about 1.4× is available and we are not offering it. Rembrandt's plate is 21.4 × 28 cm. Almost everyone who knows this picture knows it larger than it has ever been, and the 35 × 27 cm sheet puts it back to the size it actually is.
If a larger sheet is ever wanted, the numbers are ready: 50 × 40 cm, image 39.00 × 29.51 cm at exactly 300 dpi, margins 5.50 cm sides / 3.95 top / 4.54 bottom.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Rembrandt died in 1669 and the plate was printed in 1643. Public domain in every market we serve.
The digitisation. The National Gallery of Art states that this object's media is free and in the public domain under its Open Access policy, which permits commercial use without licence or fee. File taken from the museum's own IIIF endpoint (api.nga.gov/iiif), not from an aggregator.
Our file. The crop, the tonal work and the border are ours. We sell you a print of it; we do not sell you the rights to it.
Rights checked 1 September 2026.
Framing this sheet
- 35 × 27 cm
- Image 28.00 × 21.18 cm at original size, 1:1. Margins 3.50 cm sides / 2.70 cm top / 3.12 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Landscape. One format only
- Frame
- 35 × 27 cm is not a stocked size everywhere. The nearest standard frame is 11 × 14 in (27.9 × 35.6 cm) turned landscape, which leaves a few millimetres of play; a 30 × 40 cm frame with a cut mount also works well
- Passepartout
- This is the one sheet where we would recommend one. A small dark etching gains from a wide mount — a 40 × 50 cm frame with a mount cut to about 29 × 22 cm gives the plate room without touching the printed border
- Glazing
- Anti-reflective glass. The drypoint burr in the sky is the thing to be able to see
Measure your frame before you order. Frame sizes vary between makers, and some frames have a rebate that swallows several millimetres on each side. We give the exact printed dimensions above so you can check; we cannot take responsibility for a frame that turns out not to fit.
All sheet records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions about this sheet: info@museartis.com