Schets met een boom 1745 - 1813

Curator: Here we have "Schets met een boom," or "Sketch with a Tree," by Jacob van der Smissen, created sometime between 1745 and 1813. It's a delicate pencil drawing, seemingly capturing a landscape in fleeting strokes. Editor: It's like a whisper of a landscape. All soft grays and unfinished lines. It feels... dreamlike, almost dissolving into the paper itself. Does it remind anyone else of an ethereal memory? Curator: That ethereal quality absolutely resonates. Trees, particularly solitary ones, held huge symbolic power during the Romantic period. They often represented resilience, spiritual connection, or even the sublime confrontation with nature's vastness. Van der Smissen perhaps used trees as a symbol of something greater? Editor: The skeletal bareness, too—it almost reads as a defiant symbol, the lone tree weathering every psychological and mental storm and still holding up for a fresh bloom of spiritual promise. There’s also something about pencil as the medium that suggests vulnerability and the provisional. It's a medium suited to exploration and revelation. Curator: Indeed, pencil allows for capturing an artist's initial, perhaps most intimate, response. Also consider, an incomplete sketch can invite us in, filling gaps in the composition. Van der Smissen leaves space for our minds to become active co-creators. I find that profoundly empowering. Editor: Definitely. The rough unfinished quality, rather than diminishing the work, enhances the symbolism because they represent what the Romantic movement means and embodies. It pushes beyond the purely representational, asking us to look *through* the image to grasp something more ephemeral. It's interesting how what’s missing speaks just as loudly as what’s rendered. Curator: Looking closely has only deepened my appreciation for how much the artist communicates here with so little, drawing on a broader visual language to fill in what might be missing. Editor: Exactly, what I’ll take away from the piece is a renewed interest in searching out such symbols from artists with varying degrees of visual emphasis, and understanding why those symbols appear.