Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on brown prepared paper, 107 x 177 mm. Vertical tear near the lower left corner. Framing lines in brown ink. Some brown spots in the sky. Watermark: Coat of arms (fragment). Inscribed in the lower right corner Rimbrant, and numbered 307, in pen and brown ink. Unidentified collector’s mark in the lower left corner.

Rembrandt’s landscape drawings range from spontaneous sketches done on the spot to more worked-out compositions. In the present drawing, some shrubs in the centre foreground have been cancelled with white body colour (now transparent). The vegetation has been moved to the right, possibly to balance the trees on the left. There is a careful gradation between the darker foreground, the middle ground, and the lightly sketched background on the right.

The style is close to that of the previous drawing, the difference being a smoother paper and a finer pen. However, the earliest renderings of this type of motif date from the early 1640s, as in an etching of a landscape with a cottage and hay barn, dated 1641 (Bartsch 225). The present sheet could also be compared with the landscape drawings dated around 1650, such as one in Berlin of farmhouses near a road. [Magnusson, Dutch Drawings no. 335]