Stående nøgen kvinde, set fra ryggen 1912

This drawing of a standing nude woman, seen from the back, was made with pencil by J.A. Jerichau, sometime between 1890 and 1916. Look at the pressure of the pencil on the page, and you can almost feel Jerichau’s hand move. See how the lines vary in thickness, some confident and bold, others tentative, searching. What was it like to draw this model? A kind of dance of looking, and then translating what you see onto the page. I wonder about the quick, expressive marks used to define the figure’s back and shoulders versus the more scribbled treatment of the drapery. It’s a reminder that even in the most seemingly straightforward representation, there’s room for abstraction, for the artist’s hand to play and interpret. These gestures, this vocabulary of marks, has been shared across generations of artists—a continuous conversation.