Landschap met man en twee karren met hakhout 1924

Willem de Zwart made this landscape with man and two carts with wood, probably with some kind of etching tool. I'm thinking about the tiny marks making up the whole thing, scratches made in rapid succession across the plate to build up this vision of figures emerging from the forest. It looks like they're carrying some kind of load, the weight of it pressing them down into the dirt of the road. It must have been a laborious task to make this image. I imagine the artist standing over the plate, pushing and pulling the tool, wiping away residue, trying to see what was emerging. The image is like a memory, smudged and hazy. The trees become vertical streaks and the sky a barely visible glow. I guess artists like De Zwart were in conversation with the Barbizon school, finding a kind of romanticism in everyday scenes of rural life. I think of Courbet, Millet. He's probably thinking about them too as he makes this. What you see here is just one stop in an ongoing relay race between artists, passing the baton of vision from one hand to another.