Landschap met boom op een dijk te Dieren c. 1905 - 1920

Curator: Before us is "Landschap met boom op een dijk te Dieren," or "Landscape with a Tree on a Dyke at Dieren," created circa 1905-1920 by Willem Bastiaan Tholen. The Rijksmuseum houses this understated landscape. Editor: My immediate impression is of quiet resilience. There’s a starkness to it, almost lonely, but the density of the tree suggests tenacity, its branches reaching across the open space. And it is made with graphite, I see... Curator: Yes, and his choice of graphite enhances that feel. Tholen lived during a time of immense social and political change. Consider the labor of those who built and maintained these dykes. It symbolizes so much about human control over nature and the inherent class divisions it represents. Who has access to these protections? And at what cost? Editor: Precisely. Dyke construction is absolutely a feat of material transformation, a testament to collective effort but always on unstable ground. You see the pencil lines – they map an intervention in the landscape, a tension between natural and imposed structures. Curator: The lone tree, for me, reads as a witness, a survivor, perhaps even an embodiment of a pre-industrial, more grounded relationship to the land. It makes me reflect on the rural-urban shift and its inherent disruptions of culture and community. How might a feminist reading deconstruct this? Editor: I am most drawn to the tree's almost architectural quality, the layered textures he creates with pencil suggesting growth and weathering, a collaboration of human intent and natural processes etched across time, even with just graphite and paper. The social context seeps into even the grain of the image. Curator: It’s a testament to Tholen’s skills that something rendered so simply invites these complex readings. Thank you. Editor: Thank you, my view broadened into the sociopolitical ramifications by our discussion about labour.