Ontwerp illustratie voor King Lear van Shakespeare: Koning Lear, Cordelia en hun leger 1878 - 1948

This illustration for King Lear by Jacob Pieter van den Bosch is made with ink, and you can see the artist's hand in the nervous energy of all those thin, scratchy lines, like he’s trying to trap figures from a dream on the page, and there is a urgency to his line. I like to imagine Van den Bosch making this work; what was he thinking about as he made the marks? He’s evoking the density of Shakespeare's play, with all its dark themes, through the density of his marks. Look how he contrasts light and dark to create drama, using white space to carve out forms amidst the darkness of the scene. The image is full of figures and horses, so heavy with detail that it almost tips over, and yet there’s something very light and airy about the way the forms emerge from the whiteness of the page. It reminds me how all artists are in an ongoing conversation across time, inspiring each other’s creativity.