Man die op een ezel rijdt c. 1916

Reijer Stolk made this pencil sketch of a man riding a donkey at an unknown date. Look closely, and you can feel Stolk’s hand moving across the paper, searching for the form of his subject. There’s a lightness to the lines, a sense of tentative exploration. I bet he really knew what it was like to try to capture a moving thing, the way the donkey probably kept shifting! I wonder what Stolk was thinking about as he sketched, and how his personal experiences might have seeped into the work. Maybe he saw it as an allegory. Was it a political statement? A personal reflection? The beauty of a sketch like this is that it leaves so much open to interpretation. Ultimately, this image is a reminder that art is a conversation. Stolk speaks to us across time, and we, in turn, bring our own perspectives and experiences to meet his. It becomes a shared space of imagination, where meanings shift and multiply, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty.