A fine and well-balanced impression with wide margins all round.

The print, similar in subject matter to the artist’s Hundred Guilder Print of about four years earlier, suggests the influence of Raphael’s fresco of Parnassus; Royalton-Kisch notes that in 1652 Rembrandt sketched a version of this work in the album amicorum of his friend Jan Six. The classical harmony of the architecture is established by a simple scheme of horizontal and vertical elements, but the artist enriched the details and atmospheric effects of the composition, as Royalton-Kisch further observes, by going over the etched plate in drypoint. The title often given to this print, “La Petite Tombe,” appears to have confused scholars and collectors for generations. Royalton-Kisch establishes that it was used by Gersaint in 1751, based on an earlier usage of the name—when it, in fact, referred to Nicholas La Tombe, who may have commissioned the work. Members of the La Tombe family are noted in documents relating to Rembrandt dating to between 1650 and 1658 (cf. Hinterding/Luijten/Royalton-Kisch, pp. 280f., cat. no. 68).