View of Amsterdam

Because his father was a miller, Rembrandt must have enjoyed adding the windmill to View of Amsterdam, his first landscape print. The early 1640s marked a flurry of landscape activity for him in and around his adopted city. Several etchings reflect the area near the new house that he and Saskia bought in Amsterdam in 1639. Then, after her death in 1642, he may have consoled himself by walking the countryside, with its picturesque old farmhouses. Scholars even speculate that, because Rembrandt ceased making self-portraits around this time, he may have found in nature the sort of meditative self-reflection that he had previously found in self-portraiture.