Artwork story
About Tree with roots laid bare alongside a stream, a hilly landscape and a man walking behind quadrupeds beyond
The artist and artwork
Karel Dujardin etched Tree with roots laid bare alongside a stream, a hilly landscape and a man walking behind quadrupeds beyond in 1659. The Amsterdam-born Dutch artist, who died in Venice, made the small sheet from a copper plate, building light and terrain from exposed lines and dense crosshatching. Related Met prints show his recurring attention to sheep, goats, donkeys, shepherds, water, and ruins. Here, however, the towering tree and its exposed root system claim more space than the distant traveler or animals.
The world around it
Dujardin made the etching eleven years after the Dutch Republic gained independence from Spain in 1648. Maritime trade, finance, and industry had produced great urban wealth, while a competitive art market served merchants and professionals rather than relying only on courts or churches. The Met notes that as much as seventy percent of Holland's population lived in cities and towns. Landscape prints offered those urban collectors associations with agriculture, travel, local pride, fresh air, and imagined walks away from city life; inexpensive works on paper helped rustic imagery circulate especially widely.
A detail to notice
The title reads almost like directions for moving through the image. Begin at the great dark trunk on the right, descend through roots exposed above the stream, then follow the water leftward toward a man and his animals before climbing to the pale hills. Dujardin reverses the usual hierarchy of scale: the human procession is tiny, while the tree's forked body rises beyond the top edge and its roots spread like another landscape. Sparse horizontal strokes keep the sky open, but layered hatching makes the foreground nearly black. Light, distance, and erosion, not an event, create the drama.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Etching and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include sheet: 5 13/16 x 7 5/16 in. (14.7 x 18.5 cm).
Subject terms include Animals, Men, Rivers, Landscapes, and Trees. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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