Brug over een rivier in Kanton 1917

Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkamp made this print of a bridge over a river in Kanton, and what grabs me is the way it’s all about the process of seeing. Look at how the surface is built up from so many little marks. There’s a lot of hatching, and cross-hatching, giving everything a kind of shimmering, insubstantial feel, like a memory. And everything is caught in this sepia tone, a wash of nostalgia that permeates the scene. It’s not just a visual depiction, it’s about evoking the feeling of a place, the buzz of the city and the languid motion of the water. That bridge, the way it's rendered, not as a solid structure but as a collection of strokes, feels really telling. I’m reminded of Piranesi, another printmaker who understood the power of the drawn line to conjure imaginary spaces.