Twee boten op een Bretons strand 1928

Lodewijk Schelfhout made this etching of two boats on a Breton beach sometime in the first half of the 20th century. The print is almost entirely black and white, except for the warm cream color of the paper. I can imagine Schelfhout moving back and forth between the scene and the plate, scratching away at the metal, testing the image with ink, reworking it to get the tonal balance just right. There’s something very comforting about the clouds, rocks, and boats rendered in these soft, feathery lines. The clouds billow in great soft pillows, casting shadows on the still water. Schelfhout would have known other Dutch landscape painters such as Jongkind and Weissenbruch, who also drew inspiration from the coast. He probably felt a sense of kinship, a part of a long tradition of artists finding a quiet kind of beauty in these everyday scenes. Prints like this remind us that art-making is a conversation across time, artists looking and learning from each other, trying to capture something essential about seeing and feeling.