Gezicht op een huis before 1893

This print, "Gezicht op een huis", shows us an anonymous view of a home and the surrounding buildings. The printmaking technique used here – likely engraving or etching – is important to consider. These methods involve laborious, skilled work, and stand in marked contrast to other forms of artistic production. Engraving and etching require considerable effort to produce a single image, and they reflect a very different attitude to reproduction than, say, industrial printing. The tiny scale here also bears consideration. While these printing processes can create highly detailed images, the small size of this print suggests a deliberate choice. Is this an implicit comment on the intimacy of domestic life? Or, perhaps, it speaks to the way that even the grandest architectural ambitions must be realized at a human scale? It is through the careful labor of its making that this image gains its power.