Zittende vrouw, hond en een haven 1892 - 1916

Rik Wouters made this etching, ‘Zittende vrouw, hond en een haven’, with ink on paper. I imagine Wouters hunched over the plate, scraping lines, his breath held in concentration. The light catches the burr of the drypoint, those velvety blacks pulling me into an intimate domestic scene. There's a woman, maybe his wife, and her dogs, but also a harbor scene. The whole thing feels smudged, hazy, like a memory half-recalled or like he's trying to capture a dream. The etching is so free, like he's improvising—digging and biting into the plate with a kind of intuitive energy. You can see him thinking, feeling, making marks in response to the world around him. Wouters reminds me of Bonnard or Vuillard, these artists who blurred the lines between the personal and the picturesque. It's a reminder that art is a conversation, each artist building on the discoveries of those who came before, etching their own experiences onto the plates of history.