Vrouw met drie peuters, waarschijnlijk de tweeling Ad en Johanna van der Kop (uiterst links en rechts) met twee familieleden after 1901

Willem Carel van der Kop made this small gelatin silver print, a portrait of a woman with three young children, location and date unknown. The sepia tone gives it a kind of antique feeling, like looking into the past through a brown-tinted lens. You can almost smell the old paper and the slightly faded ink. It’s a pretty straightforward composition, a family portrait, but it’s the details that catch my eye. Like the way the light falls on the children’s faces, making them glow against the darker background. The texture of the print is soft and grainy, like a memory that’s been worn smooth by time. There's something about that gaze of the children too, straight at the camera, that makes you wonder what they were thinking, what their lives were like. It reminds me a little bit of the early portraits by Alice Neel, the way she captured the raw humanity of her subjects. It’s a reminder that art is always a conversation, a dialogue across time and space.