Schets met enkele bomen 1750 - 1809

Editor: This pencil drawing, titled "Schets met enkele bomen" – Sketch with some trees – is by David Alphonse de Sandoz-Rollin and dates back to the late 18th or early 19th century. It’s a very faint landscape sketch, giving a rather ghostly, almost melancholic feeling. What symbols or meanings emerge for you when you look at it? Curator: That's a lovely observation. Given its creation during the Romantic period, this sketch participates in a potent visual vocabulary of nature and emotion. While seemingly simple, the "trees" themselves carry centuries of symbolism. Have you considered what the *tree* represents in folklore and mythology? Editor: I think of the Tree of Life, maybe… and interconnectedness. Curator: Precisely! And during the Romantic era, there’s also a potent turn inward. The tree becomes not just a symbol *out there* in the world, but a reflection of the *self*. The faintness of the drawing, the tentative lines…it's not a confident assertion of nature, but more an *evocation* of feeling through nature. What feelings do those faint lines evoke for you? Editor: A sense of fragility, perhaps? The fleeting nature of experience. Curator: Indeed. Think too of the artist's choice *not* to create a highly detailed or polished landscape. The unfinished quality invites us, the viewers, to complete the image, to project *our* feelings onto this suggestive space. Does that reading resonate with you? Editor: It does. I appreciate the idea that the artist is inviting us into the emotional landscape. I will keep this in mind as I continue my studies. Thank you for opening up these different ways of thinking. Curator: My pleasure. It’s fascinating to see how visual symbols can activate cultural memory in so many ways.