Landschap before 1904

Théophile de Bock made this landscape print with etching, and you can see his working process right there on the page. It feels like he's thinking through the landscape, one line at a time. The texture is amazing, isn't it? The way the lines build up in the foreground, kind of scratchy and dense, then dissolve into the distance. Look at the trees on the right – they’re just a jumble of marks, but somehow they totally read as leaves and branches. And those clouds! They’re like little puffs of smoke, barely there, but they give the whole scene a sense of space and air. It's like he's trying to capture not just what the landscape looks like, but how it feels to be in it. It makes me think a little bit of Whistler, the way he uses etching to create these atmospheric, almost dreamlike scenes. But de Bock has his own thing going on, a kind of raw, unpolished energy that I really dig. It's a reminder that art isn't about perfection, it's about exploration and discovery.