Landschap met een toren c. 1828 - 1897

Adrianus Eversen sketched this landscape with a tower using graphite on paper sometime in the 19th century. The ethereal, unfinished quality of the drawing makes it a suggestive rather than descriptive piece. This was a period of enormous social change in the Netherlands, as it was throughout Europe. Eversen was a painter of cityscapes, and one can easily imagine this study as a preliminary sketch for a finished painting. In the Netherlands, the association of landscape with national identity has a long history; so perhaps the tower can be viewed as a symbol of national pride in a time of turbulence. The institutional context is significant. But a cultural historian might ask, whose landscape is this? Who has access to it? What does it mean to sketch a landscape rather than to paint it? Answering such questions requires careful research into the institutions of art, the social history of the Netherlands, and the cultural meanings of landscape.