Winterlandschap langs de Aelbertsbergweg in Bloemendaal before 1909

This photograph of a winter landscape along the Aelbertsbergweg in Bloemendaal was captured by Richard Tepe. It’s a small thing, but it feels vast, doesn’t it? Look at how the frost clings to every branch, every twig, transforming the familiar into something otherworldly. It's a stark palette, mostly monochrome, but within that, there's so much texture and light, it almost shimmers. The road is dark, almost black, and that pulls you into the scene, towards the vanishing point, and what's beyond. What strikes me most is the contrast between the delicate, intricate details of the frosted trees and the stark, almost brutal lines of the telephone wires cutting through the sky. It’s the natural world versus the man-made, coexisting, but not quite harmonizing. It reminds me of some of the landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich, but here it’s less about Romanticism and more about a quiet observation of the everyday. Tepe finds beauty in the mundane, and that, to me, is the essence of good art.