Vrouw met kind c. 1901 - 1927

Johan Antonie de Jonge created this drawing of a woman and child sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. It looks like he made it with charcoal. The image is all lines, hatching and cross-hatching, to build form, value and tone. The surface reads like a dense thicket of tiny marks. I wonder how long it took him to make this. Was it a study for something larger? Or was it just a way to record a mother and child, there, in front of him? I’m thinking about the way the image appears to grow organically, accumulating through touch, gesture, and the very act of noticing. De Jonge, like many artists, probably learned a lot from others, soaking up the work of artists who came before him. But here, in his own work, his vision feels very particular, both in the directness of the description, and the strange cropping of the scene. It’s all part of a really long, ongoing conversation that artists have with one another across time, inspiring our creativity.