Landweg in de Kempen 1838 - 1911

Curator: "Landweg in de Kempen," or "Country Road in the Kempen," an etching on paper by Jean Pierre François Lamorinière, dating sometime between 1838 and 1911. You can find this small, jewel-like print in the Rijksmuseum collection. Editor: There's something so melancholic and windswept about it, like a scene from a forgotten fairy tale. Curator: Yes, the delicate etching captures a sort of lonely, rural idyll, wouldn't you say? Lamorinière employs a masterful economy of line here, doesn't he? Consider how he uses hatching and cross-hatching to define the textures of the foliage and the sky. Editor: The contrast almost looks like photogravure—he really knows how to describe tone using marks, I mean I find myself wondering what camera would see that light? Almost ghostly, like memory, like an echo of some very private experience... Curator: Precisely! This reflects the realist style, the attempt to capture the world as it is experienced, stripped of idealization but that isn't always emotionally neutral. And how about the placement of that farmhouse? Just a modest form anchoring the composition! Editor: But almost dissolving, if you will! Its simplicity gets me and becomes a larger meditation about place and impermanence all at once. I find I keep going back to the scale, which adds to its intense intimacy – like a secret whispered. It’s an entire world distilled. Curator: It’s quite fascinating, isn’t it, how such a small, seemingly simple image can contain such a vastness of feeling? We are able to lose ourselves in its delicate detail and consider themes such as the enduring strength and beauty of nature. Editor: Absolutely, and for me, that sense of the past pressing against the present... as a feeling that's almost woven into the paper itself! It invites quiet contemplation, something profound even within such simplicity.