Silhouet van een vrouw c. 1916

Reijer Stolk sketched this “Silhouette of a Woman” in pencil sometime during his lifetime, between 1896 and 1945. The drawing comes to us from the collection of the Rijksmuseum, an institution dedicated to preserving and interpreting Dutch art and history. Stolk’s image presents an anonymous woman, simply outlined, without offering any sense of her inner life. In a society deeply structured by class, gender, and religious differences, the meaning of the portrait would have shifted depending on how the viewer aligned with the subject and the culture. To better understand the drawing, we might consult historical sources that reveal the lived experiences of women in the Netherlands during the first half of the twentieth century, and learn more about the artist's own social position. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and our understanding of it is richer when we consider the context in which it was made.