Soldaat, dame en heer, van achteren c. 1653 - 1654

Curator: Right, let’s consider this drawing now: “Soldier, Lady, and Gentleman, from Behind,” made around 1653-1654 by Gesina ter Borch. It’s currently held in the Rijksmuseum. You can see she worked with pen, watercolor, and drawing to create this scene. What strikes you immediately? Editor: Well, there's a sense of observation tinged with melancholy, don't you think? It is of the back views of three figures as if they are fading from our memory, from reality, or like characters receding into the background of some stage play. Curator: It’s interesting that you picked up on melancholy! Ter Borch's meticulous process certainly yields a layered sense of realism, where we get not just visual detail but a snapshot of social conventions. The materials themselves – pen, ink, and watercolor – are all easily portable, weren't expensive at that time, suggesting a kind of everyday-ness in the work’s creation, a readily available method to quickly capture the upper class as it’s passing by... Editor: I do also sense the almost ephemeral quality that watercolor gives the scene…they look almost ghostlike. Does it invite thoughts about the labor behind such seemingly fleeting, elegantly dressed figures? What does that suggest? Curator: The textile industry in the Dutch Golden Age boomed during this time. It underscores an increasingly mercantile economy but I think too the materiality invites commentary on luxury and the new, rapidly changing, class identities that it fostered. Editor: What’s fascinating is that these people, once icons, are reduced in this tableau to pure appearance. They are presented almost as silhouettes—evanescent. And perhaps that is the point of such work—that it forces consideration of human transience even at its most affluent. Curator: Precisely. Gesina ter Borch, through these deliberate acts of recording and rendering, reminds us of the inherent link between material conditions and human experience—an association that the work powerfully expresses. Editor: Absolutely. A fleeting yet resonant reminder. Thank you for sharing it.