Landschap met aangemeerde boot 1858

Jan van Lokhorst made this etching, called *Landschap met aangemeerde boot*, sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is a tranquil rural scene showing a figure walking past a farmhouse beside a canal with a moored boat. It's tempting to see this as an innocent depiction of the Dutch countryside, yet the art historian will want to dig deeper. We might ask: what does it mean to represent the countryside as a place of simple pleasures? Who is the intended audience for this image? Was it intended as a form of social commentary on the industrialising cities? Or an expression of national pride? These are difficult questions to answer definitively. Yet by researching the artist and the social context in which he was working, we can get a better idea of how this image might have been viewed by its original audience. By consulting sources such as exhibition reviews, artists' biographies, and social histories of the period, we can gain a richer understanding of the politics of imagery.