Weg met bomen 1773 - 1843

Editor: So, here we have "Weg met bomen" – "Away with Trees" – by Georges Michel, probably created sometime between 1773 and 1843. It's a graphite and pencil drawing on paper, a small landscape. It has a melancholy feel to me, a sort of quiet solitude. What strikes you when you look at it? Curator: That melancholy, that quiet solitude… yes, precisely! It whispers, doesn't it? Almost like a half-remembered dream. What's interesting to me is how Michel captures the essence of Romanticism, that yearning for nature, but with this really stripped-down technique. It’s just a few pencil strokes, but he creates depth, he creates mood. Do you get a sense of place? Of being *there*? Editor: Definitely. I can almost feel the dampness in the air. And even though it's so simple, there's something very powerful about the trees themselves. Curator: Exactly! They're almost like figures standing on a stage. Michel isn’t just showing us a landscape; he is staging an encounter. Consider the title too – it seems aggressive, violent, but is it just referring to pruning? Or is something else being implied? Perhaps that there's a sense of inevitability in what is taken and what is left. I often see landscapes by him that way, he seems to suggest their passing beauty is about to disappear any moment... What do you make of the emptiness? Editor: That makes sense. It adds a layer of complexity that I hadn’t fully appreciated before. The emptiness is perhaps foreboding – what disappears is lost for good? Thanks, I am not looking at Michel the same way. Curator: Foreboding, precisely! So much conveyed in the simple strokes and light application of the graphite, but a potent image!