Weiland omgrensd door een hek 1848 - 1888

Here is Anton Mauve's pencil drawing, "Weiland omgrensd door een hek." Mauve, writing in the late nineteenth century, lived in a time when Europe was undergoing intense social and economic transformation. As industrialization progressed, artists like Mauve turned to the countryside, seeking a pastoral escape from urban life. Mauve's vision is filtered through a lens of class privilege. These rural landscapes often romanticized the lives of the working class, obscuring the harsh realities of agricultural labor, and who was allowed to partake in this version of beauty. The fence, then, is not merely a structural element, but a boundary, both physical and symbolic. It marks a space, a privilege, that is both protected and exclusionary. This drawing, with its delicate lines, invites us to consider our own relationship to the land. What do we see when we look at it, and whose stories are we missing?