Hercules in gevecht met de Hydra van Lerna 1877 - 1930

Henri de Groux made this drawing of Hercules fighting the Hydra, though no date is given, sometime between 1867 and 1930 with pen on paper. Look at the frantic penmanship, all those etched lines! De Groux is wrangling a mass of detail into some kind of expressive, energetic form. Hercules swings his club with fury at the monster beneath him, all those writhing snakes. I imagine de Groux wrestling with the page to depict such drama, each stroke building upon the last in a frenzy of creativity. I am reminded of other history painters such as Delacroix, and even Rubens, with the spiraling of the figures. The drama! The scale! You feel for the artist and his challenge. What was he thinking as he etched all those tiny lines? Painters are in an ongoing dialogue with each other across time. I think painting is like a form of embodied expression and embrace its ambiguity. It allows for multiple readings rather than fixed meanings.