Drawing for the primer_ Hunter 1905

Hans Thoma made this drawing of a hunter, sometime around 1905, with pen and ink on paper. Look at the scratchy marks creating that slightly awkward hunter standing there with his two dogs. I can just imagine Thoma making this drawing and thinking about what it means to go out hunting, that weird relationship with nature where you go into the landscape in order to extract something from it. He probably thought about earlier artists, like Courbet, who also painted hunters, and how that imagery sits within a history of landscape painting. There's something deeply human and vulnerable about the guy Thoma drew. With just a few lines, the artist manages to convey the human condition. The dogs look pretty good though, ready for anything! It makes me think about our own human interactions, which are messy, intuitive, and sometimes feel like we are stumbling through a landscape we don't quite understand.