Studieblad met diverse zeilschepen 1870 - 1931

Curator: This is a study sheet by Willem Bastiaan Tholen, dating from between 1870 and 1931. The medium is pencil on paper. Editor: Immediately, it strikes me as something so fleeting. These light, tentative pencil strokes…it feels intimate, like a private glimpse into the artist’s process. Curator: Absolutely. And understanding Tholen's body of work – mostly landscapes, often maritime scenes – we can read this less as a 'finished' piece and more as crucial preparation. It speaks to a very specific method. The repetition of these sailboats, the variations in their form, that's not just about aesthetics. What can it tell us about the lives of the sailors depicted and the colonial trade routes and global market at this time? Editor: True. It prompts me to think about where these materials came from—the source of the graphite for the pencils, the production of the paper. It raises questions of access. Who has the resources to create and document? I’m curious how it's bound and whether or not the sheets could be easily distributed and disseminated into the broader world. What labor was required to make it? And were these sailors themselves given the ability to render their ships? Curator: Those are potent questions. Looking through an intersectional lens, how were access to resources stratified along axes of gender and race, at the time this was drawn? This seemingly simple sheet can unveil the socio-economic hierarchies of that period. This artwork operates as a historical mirror, challenging us to interrogate who holds the power to represent and whose stories are being visually archived. Editor: I agree, seeing the subtle variances across these sketches allows me to picture the repetitive movements of a laborer at a factory endlessly sketching lines on a page. The slight angle of the lines would reflect that specific individual’s conditions of production. So much hidden in the so-called ‘original’. Curator: Thinking about this piece has really reframed my appreciation of these preparatory sketches. Editor: Likewise, I’m struck by the materiality embedded within such ephemeral strokes, underscoring a physical dimension often overlooked in these types of quick preliminary drawing studies.