En bro 1826

This drawing, En bro, was made in Denmark by Søren Henrik Petersen. It’s a very simple scene, rendered in pencil: a stone bridge, some foliage. But think for a moment about the bridge itself. Every stone would have been quarried, cut, transported and placed, all through considerable labor. The pencil strokes in this drawing mimic that process, one by one describing the stones’ textures, sizes, and relationships to one another. In this sense, it isn’t just a picture of a bridge. It’s an evocation of all the work that went into building it. The drawing, therefore, memorializes not just the structure itself, but the labor and skills of the people who made it possible. What might seem like a conventional landscape rendering is in fact a meditation on the value of physical work.