Huizenbouw in Den Haag 1888 - 1934

Willem Adrianus Grondhout made this print of house building in The Hague using etching, I imagine, sometime in the early 20th century. Look at the dome structure and the skeletal wooden beams. You can almost feel the artist scratching away at the plate, building up these lines like tentative scaffolding. I can imagine him, sleeves rolled up, peering at the scene, deciding which marks to make, and in which direction, capturing the quiet chaos of construction. It makes me think about Piranesi’s etchings of Rome, but on a smaller scale, with more intimacy. Grondhout is focused on the everyday, the mundane beauty of a city growing and changing. There’s an exchange happening between artists here, a conversation about how we see, what we choose to depict, and how we translate the world into marks. The artist leaves space for the viewer to contemplate the scene, to see what is there, and what is possible.