Skitser af rovfugle, fuglevinger og løve. Landskabsskitse 1900 - 1905

Niels Larsen Stevns made this spread of sketches of birds, wings, and a lion, with pencil, in no particular year. You can really see the hand of the artist, can’t you? The marks, smudged and layered, show Stevns thinking through the forms as he goes. Look at the top left; you can see where he’s redrawn the birds over and over, trying to get the weight and the stance just right. It’s not about a perfect representation; it's about the process of seeing and understanding. The landscape sketch to the right offers a quick grounding, a place for these creatures to inhabit, even if just in the artist’s imagination. There’s a raw, unfiltered quality to these studies, like looking at the pages of a personal journal. You can see a similar approach in the sketchbooks of Delacroix, where the act of drawing is a way of feeling and knowing the world. The ambiguity and openness of this sketch invites us to see with our own eyes.