Gertrude Magie’s landscape is rendered with undulating and swirling hatches. They accumulate into atmospheric forms gathered like cobwebs between the branches of the trees. At times, it’s difficult to tell whether one is looking at bushy clumps of leaves, puffy clouds, or billows of smoke rising from distant chimneys. Such pictorial ambiguity invites the viewer to complete the image by making these distinctions for themselves. At bottom left, Magie includes a short musical phrase, hinting at affinities between the lines that compose a drawing and those that make up musical notation.
Magie was both an artist and a collector, and her keen interest in prints of the nineteenth-century French etching revival (some of which she gifted to the Princeton University Art Museum) is evident in this print. Influenced by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, etching revivalists used quick, loose linework and dense hatching to achieve evocative atmospheric effects, as Magie does here.\n
","remarks":null}],"datebegin":1882,"sortnumber":"1945 39x","published_date":"2026-02-11 07:38:37.254854","objectid":5338,"dimensions":"plate: 26 x 19 cm. (10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.)\r\nsheet: 36.2 x 25 cm. (14 1/4 x 9 13/16 in.)","on_view":false}