Zittend meisje in een landschap c. 1884 - 1887

Willem Witsen sketched ‘Seated Girl in a Landscape’ with graphite. The drawing's formal qualities immediately strike us through its intimate depiction of a child rendered in delicate strokes and muted tones. Witsen skillfully employs line and shading to create a sense of depth and texture, evident in the way the girl's figure is softly modeled against the sparse landscape. The composition, viewed from an elevated perspective, focuses our attention on the child, set against a backdrop of loosely defined foliage. The artist uses a semiotic language of nature, but it remains ambiguous, destabilizing any fixed reading. In closing, the interplay of light and shadow emphasizes the transient nature of the scene, reminding us that art is not about capturing a definitive truth, but about engaging in a process of continuous interpretation.