Paard 1891 - 1941

Curator: Leo Gestel created this work, titled "Paard" - "Horse" - sometime between 1891 and 1941. It's a drawing done in pencil. Editor: My first thought is, that horse seems caught between realities. Is it solid, or is it about to evaporate? A ghostly horse! Curator: It’s precisely that ethereality that captivates me. Gestel’s rendering feels incomplete, like a half-remembered dream of a horse. There is something fragile about the single pencil line outlining its form. The animal is iconic: we've drawn horses since the caves of Lascaux. What's this horse referencing? Editor: Absolutely! And the horse as an archetypal image holds such immense cultural weight – power, freedom, nobility… think of warhorses, mythic steeds… it's a lineage of potency. But this horse feels subdued, gentle almost. Perhaps it references a lost freedom, a vulnerability lurking beneath the surface. Curator: I love that interpretation, this almost childlike rendering combined with the powerful symbolism creates an interesting tension. The landscape style is very delicate. Perhaps Gestel aimed to show how fleeting everything in the world is by using very minimal lineart. I notice that it is so minimalist it becomes something abstract, a collection of meaningful, simple marks. Editor: And the simplicity of the line encourages our mind to fill in the blanks, drawing upon our own personal experiences and collective memories of horses. The single confident line, which can suggest everything without actually defining it – almost like an alphabet. We intuitively know this image from birth. Curator: You're right; we co-create this horse with Gestel. And seeing it here in the Rijksmuseum reminds me that even incomplete visions can carry profound emotional resonance. Editor: Absolutely. "Paard" lingers in the mind like a whisper. Gestel gives us a form to recognise. A form, to understand humanity's link to history.