Huis tussen de bomen 1839 - 1872

Curator: This sketch is called “Huis tussen de bomen,” or "House Between the Trees," made sometime between 1839 and 1872 by Johannes Tavenraat. It's a pencil drawing on paper, currently residing here at the Rijksmuseum. Editor: It feels incomplete, or maybe just captured in a fleeting moment. Those hurried pencil strokes create a sense of mist, of transience, almost like I'm viewing a half-remembered dream. Curator: Well, Tavenraat was definitely working in a realist style, focusing on landscapes, which often involved sketching *en plein air*. Think about the logistics. Carting your paper, pencils – even a stool, maybe – out into a wooded area. I mean, you wouldn't want to drag your whole studio outdoors. This makes it more immediate, raw even. Editor: Makes me consider where that paper came from, too. Nineteenth-century paper mills weren’t exactly paragons of environmental virtue. Imagine the labor and material involved to create the ground for the sketch, let alone the work to bring forth this image from the pencil, too. It’s a landscape built on extraction. Curator: A landscape both literally represented and materially reliant on extraction. I wonder if Tavenraat was conscious of that tension as he worked. Though, his main focus likely revolved around depicting natural light. Look how he uses faint lines to suggest atmospheric perspective, to define distance and depth, just subtle shifts in shading… Editor: Sure, there's something to the ethereal rendering of light, but these hasty strokes have an almost anxious quality about them. Look, for instance, at the scribbled shading defining the trees – this suggests the rapid, almost frantic motion needed to seize an atmosphere and effect of light as it rapidly changed across the Dutch landscape. It brings me to think of how all landscapes carry the evidence of their making, both culturally and environmentally. Curator: Perhaps. Or maybe that very tension, between the quiet serenity he tries to capture and the frantic effort of capturing it, speaks to something deeper about our relationship with nature. After all, we build houses *between* the trees, we don’t truly belong to them. Editor: Indeed, and it's in those very contradictions, embedded within the materiality of even the simplest sketch, where we can uncover new ways to view a picture like "House Between the Trees". Curator: Absolutely. Art provides more than mere image, it contains the processes, materials, and history involved in its creation, all captured through one person’s vision.