Straat in Rijswijk 1888 - 1934

This print of a street in Rijswijk was made by Willem Adrianus Grondhout using etching. The overall tonality is very muted and dark. The artist is working very loosely and sketchily. The scene has a kind of dreamlike quality, a sense of being caught between reality and memory. If you look closely, you can see the way the artist uses dense, cross-hatched lines to build up the darker areas of the buildings, and then uses much lighter, more delicate lines to suggest the light filtering down the street. These lines, these marks, aren't just describing what's there, they are building a mood. The etched lines have a palpable presence, like scratches on a surface, which evoke a sense of history. This piece makes me think of Piranesi's etchings of Rome, those haunting architectural fantasies, where the city is this labyrinth of crumbling structures and hidden corners. Like Piranesi, Grondhout seems to be interested in the poetics of space, the way architecture shapes our experience of the world.