Grazing cow to the left 

Curator: Look at this unassuming sketch, "Grazing Cow to the Left," by Friedrich Wilhelm Hirt. There's a peacefulness to it, wouldn't you say? Editor: It's… reddish. Makes me think of bricks or rust, honestly. The lines feel tentative, searching. I’m wondering about the paper and where it was made. Was this a standardized size, accessible to many artists? Curator: You always bring it back to materials, don't you? It's lovely how you immediately considered the means of production, while I am instantly drawn into its simple being. But it is interesting how the choice of red chalk influences my feeling about it. It gives it a certain warmth and immediacy. Makes you feel like you’re right there in the field, doesn’t it? I think this probably was something he drew during travels around the landscape...a spontaneous impression, more of a reflection. Editor: Landscape, you say? What landscape, though? The barest suggestion of a field. I am most fascinated by the red chalk. It suggests readily available materials but also constraints in technique, each line of which suggests repeated actions of procurement, distribution, and also training. What's revealed and what’s elided, in terms of artistic labor, really catches my eye. It might even have been meant for some agricultural textbook for the peasant farmer in the region... Curator: Textbook! You think? That would make the whole scene suddenly very amusing for me. So down to earth… Perhaps that simplicity is the point, anyway: a cow, chalk, paper, rendered without pretense. There's something really refreshing about that kind of directness, isn’t there? It feels somehow modern despite its apparent realism, almost anti-bourgeois! A bit tongue-in-cheek perhaps! Editor: Or prefiguring an engagement with local conditions, and the labor they imply! And perhaps also playing into some wider anxieties about rural life at the time. Looking again I think Hirt did amazing job bringing out how livestock shaped not only physical landscapes but also the rhythms of work in their period. In my reading that elevates it, rather. I suppose it depends on what one values, looking at something like this. Curator: Agreed. It does shift things in a most pleasing and perhaps also meaningful direction. I shall never see chalk sketches of cows in the same way again.