Landschap met een boerderij in de schemering c. 1884 - 1887

Willem Witsen rendered this landscape with charcoal and pastel, capturing a farmhouse at twilight. The overarching symbol here is the fading of light itself, a motif pregnant with meaning. Light and darkness have long been used to represent knowledge and ignorance, life and death, hope and despair. We see it in Caravaggio’s dramatic tenebrism, where shadows conceal and reveal, creating a sense of spiritual drama, but also in older iconographies, like depictions of the Annunciation, where divine light illuminates the Virgin Mary. Here, the dimming light evokes a sense of melancholy, perhaps even the fading of a way of life. Consider how such imagery resurfaces repeatedly, each time imbued with the anxieties and aspirations of its age. Witsen, working in an era of rapid industrialization, perhaps subconsciously channeled a collective longing for the tranquility of rural life, now threatened by modernity. The viewer is thus drawn into a deep, subconscious connection with nature and its cycles, an emotional landscape that transcends mere representation.