Illustration til "Historien om en Moder" i H.C. Andersen, "Eventyr og Historier", Bind 2 1870 - 1873

Editor: Here we have an ink and print drawing from H.P. Hansen, dated between 1870 and 1873, an illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother.” The mood seems very somber and the scene is rather intimate. What strikes you most about this piece? Curator: Immediately, the material choices and reproduction methods interest me. This wasn't meant to be a singular artwork, carefully made for display. Instead, it's a mass-produced image, created via printmaking. The lines, meticulously engraved, become almost mechanical. Consider the labor involved in producing prints. It suggests accessibility and speaks to a broader audience engaging with both image and story. How might this mass production influence the interpretation of the narrative itself, focusing on a common sentiment? Editor: That's a really interesting point. I hadn’t thought about the implications of it being a print. It feels like a very personal, emotional scene, and printing complicates that, but how were prints consumed during this era? Curator: These prints would often appear directly within the book, acting as an intrinsic element to the reading experience, fundamentally altering the act of reading as a tactile and visual process. Consider the economics. Printmaking brought art into homes and lives otherwise untouched by original artworks, impacting notions of class and aesthetic access. The lines delineate both tenderness and sorrow within the constraints of reproducibility. Does the shift from handcrafted artwork to industrial art cheapen or amplify emotion for broader consumption? Editor: I see what you mean! The medium is almost a social leveler, making the mother’s grief accessible across different social strata through reproduced imagery in literature. It is powerful how understanding its making provides such an insightful view. Curator: Exactly. By analyzing the materiality, we moved from personal narrative to a narrative concerning the very structure of society consuming that narrative, shaping not just an aesthetic idea of motherhood, but also a socio-economic one, accessible and, maybe, universal.