Skitser af kappe og hue. Notater 1905 - 1907

Artist: This little gem is called “Skitser af kappe og hue. Notater” – which roughly translates to “Sketches of a Cape and Hood. Notes.” It comes to us from the hand of Niels Larsen Stevns, dating back to 1905-1907. It's tucked away in the Statens Museum for Kunst, or the National Gallery of Denmark, right now. What do you see when you look at it? Art Historian: I see possibilities, a whisper of stories waiting to be told. It’s unassuming, sketched in pencil and perhaps coloured pencil in places, on what looks like notebook paper. The cape and hood appear almost ghostly, floating on the page. There's a beautiful transience to it, as though the garments might dissipate at any moment. Artist: Exactly! It feels incredibly intimate, doesn't it? Like we’ve stumbled upon a page ripped straight from Stevns' sketchbook. You get this very palpable sense of him, working rapidly to capture a fleeting idea. It's pure, raw creativity. The way he scrawls notes in Danish – it’s like he's talking directly to himself, trying to work it out in his head. Art Historian: I wonder what purpose these sketches served for Stevns? Were they studies for a larger painting? Perhaps he was costuming a play. The clothing definitely seems evocative of a particular time, or even social status. We know he painted religious subjects, perhaps it was a preliminary sketch for that. There’s an intriguing anonymity to the figure beneath the cape, too, rendered only as a sketch. Artist: Or perhaps it's simply the beauty of the fabric that caught his eye! The play of light, the fall of the folds… Look at how he’s hinted at the texture – you can almost feel the weight of the fabric. I get this definite sense of solemnity, quiet contemplation. Though, being a quick sketch, I imagine the entire creative act, beginning to end, perhaps taking minutes. It's hard not to feel moved by it. It’s like witnessing a moment of pure artistic thought. Art Historian: And isn't that what makes sketches so fascinating? They offer a glimpse into the artist's mind, stripping away the layers of polish we often see in finished works. It's a kind of visual thinking-aloud, where we, the audience, get to witness the artistic process unfold before our very eyes, even a century later. Artist: Precisely. A testament to the beauty of unfinished things. It’s beautiful to wonder what went into Stevns’s thinking that day, from more than a century away. Art Historian: It offers a sense of closure knowing how well such preliminary work stands on its own as an example of Niels Larsen Stevns work, still able to enchant audiences today.