Schets van een aquarium 1876 - 1924

Curator: Here, we have Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof's "Sketch of an Aquarium," created sometime between 1876 and 1924. It's a delicate drawing, rendered in pencil. What’s your initial feeling? Editor: A bit… ghostly. There's a fragility to it, an ephemeral quality, like a memory barely held. It reminds me of those half-formed thoughts you scribble down before they vanish. Curator: Exactly. This wasn't intended as a finished piece, but a peek into Dijsselhof’s process. He's mapping out forms, exploring light and shadow… You can see notes scribbled across the page, instructions, almost like a private language. Editor: Which also reflects the time, a pre-digital, hyper-documented age. Every artistic thought had to be literally caught to avoid losing it. I'm also struck by the subject itself. Aquariums were becoming increasingly popular then. They're these contained ecosystems, miniature versions of the natural world, often exoticized and removed from their original contexts, a pretty colonisation. Curator: That's a really fascinating lens. The aquarium becomes this curated, controlled environment mirroring the societal attitudes toward nature and our place within it. Dijsselhof was so attuned to detail, but in this preparatory sketch, the details are still fluid, waiting to solidify. Editor: The drawing seems unfinished, not just in the sense of a completed artwork, but conceptually too. As if Dijsselhof, with these pencil strokes, captures more than he intended; by being incomplete, it forces us to confront this human desire to tame, possess, and present the ‘natural world’, rather than deeply respect its inherent freedoms. Curator: And maybe that unfinished quality is its greatest strength. It's a prompt, a provocation to reconsider those impulses. Editor: I completely agree. Dijsselhof's little aquarium holds bigger, urgent lessons we are still grasping for.