Verkeerde wereld 1822 - 1849

Curator: This playful print before us is called "Verkeerde wereld," or "World Upside Down," made sometime between 1822 and 1849. Its creator, I.I. de Lanier, presented this piece at the Rijksmuseum using etching and watercolor. It's utterly charming! Editor: My first impression? It’s like stepping into a topsy-turvy storybook. Each little panel pulses with this humorous disruption of the natural order – a horse pulling a man instead of the other way around, and children punishing adults! There's an energy and almost rebellious quality to the visual narrative. Curator: Precisely! These aren’t mere whimsical images. It's narrative art packed with social commentary. Think about it – in one panel, a child whips his teacher! Lanier's holding a mirror up to society and saying, "Are things truly as they should be?" It's a lighthearted critique delivered through delightfully rendered vignettes. The choice of watercolor really softens the pointed satire. Editor: Absolutely, and that watercolor choice is key to its formal reading as well. Lanier has opted for a muted palette, giving a cohesion to the entire work as it draws your eye down and along. Notice how the arrangement of the panels is also deliberate, not purely chaotic but following its own rhythm, directing you to question each world it introduces to the viewer. Curator: There’s also a genuine comic flair. This almost anticipates comic strips, doesn’t it? The individual scenes coupled with what seem like their funny, if blunt, captions form this strange meta-narrative on social injustice! Even now I feel a rebellious chuckle, looking at how easily we have come to defy hierarchy and the social order as the artist's eye has made possible. Editor: Yes! And formally the use of such simplified visual rhetoric – an uncluttered presentation, if you will – enhances its overall efficacy as the theme remains intact as the world’s natural order, or even one's sense of it, is undone. It’s as fresh a piece now as then, perhaps, offering even me, in these brief minutes, to view these simple etched works and gain, anew, what social hierarchy itself entails.