Landschap met omgevallen boom, boten en hengelaar 1905

Willem Bastiaan Tholen made this landscape with an overturned tree, boats and angler as an etching. Look at the frenetic lines, scratchy and raw, that make up the tree. It's a beautiful mess, really, like a charcoal drawing gone wild. There's this immediacy to the marks, a sense of the artist working quickly, trying to capture a fleeting moment. You can almost feel the scratch of the etching needle on the plate. See how the foliage is just a flurry of lines, like a scribble that somehow becomes a tree. And then there's that fallen tree trunk, stretching across the scene, so full of life. Tholen, like Whistler, was interested in how to use a limited palette to create atmosphere. It makes me think about how art is just an ongoing conversation, a back-and-forth between artists across time. This piece embraces that beautiful ambiguity, inviting us to bring our own interpretations.