Road in the Rain – Amersfoort 1914

Rik Wouters made this watercolor and crayon drawing of a road in Amersfoort, on a day that feels like it’s been thoroughly rained upon. The paper has this lovely warm tone, and it peeks through all the marks, uniting the whole scene. Wouters’s crayon work isn’t about hiding the process, but revealing the energy of how it was made, with these scratchy, almost frantic lines. It's like he’s trying to capture not just the look of the scene, but also the feeling of the weather. Check out the scribbled hatching of the sky, and the vertical marks suggesting rain, or the way the bare trees are rendered with such quick, wiry strokes, giving them a shivering, almost skeletal appearance. The colors are subdued but feel very accurate: the blues and greens of the wagons, the reds and browns of the buildings. It reminds me of some of Bonnard’s landscapes, in its feeling for the quiet poetry of everyday life. Ultimately, it’s this intimacy and the feeling of being present in the landscape that stays with you.