Dyreskitse 1900 - 1905

Niels Larsen Stevns made this sketch of an animal in a notebook, but when, we don’t know! It’s a kind of study in emergence. The animal appears from the page out of simple lines. You can see Stevns figuring out the animal’s shape and stance, going over lines, reinforcing some, letting others fade. What kind of animal is it? A bear, a dog, maybe even a horse? I can imagine Stevns in the moment of creation—eyes fixed on the subject, hand moving quickly to capture its essence. What’s so cool here is the immediacy: the raw energy of the artist’s hand translating what he sees onto paper. And that’s what connects artists across time—this shared language of looking, thinking, and making.