Kaart van Utrecht, 1940 c. 1947

Studio Certo made this Kaart van Utrecht in 1940 with what looks like ink and watercolour. I can imagine the mapmaker hunched over their desk, meticulously tracing the contours of the land, each line and colour placed with intention. Look at how they rendered the little buildings! I wonder what they were thinking about as they painstakingly filled in all the architectural details. Maybe they were daydreaming about the lives of the people who lived in those buildings, their hopes and dreams, their daily routines. You can feel this sense of narrative playing out across the whole scene. The earthy yellows and greens create this beautiful, pastoral scene – it’s like the Dutch Golden Age painters, like Avercamp, but in cartographic form. Ultimately, cartography and painting are both about creating a sense of place. It’s all one big conversation, right? Artists inspire each other across time, borrowing ideas, techniques, and perspectives. Each artwork builds upon what came before, like layers of paint on a canvas.