Ooievaarsnest en een landschap met een schuur 1870 - 1931

Curator: At first glance, there's a wonderful stillness to this quick pencil and pen sketch. It's titled *Ooievaarsnest en een landschap met een schuur*, which translates to "Stork's Nest and a Landscape with a Shed." The artist is Willem Bastiaan Tholen, and it's dated sometime between 1870 and 1931. Editor: Stillness, yes, but a precarious stillness. The stork's nest dominates the shed roof – its weight seems to threaten the very structure below. What was Tholen interested in by pairing such elements together? Curator: Storks are symbols of domestic bliss, family, and new beginnings. By placing that powerful symbol atop a simple shed, Tholen seems to suggest that even humble settings can be fertile ground for life and growth. The drawing echoes enduring folklore, connecting to nature's cycles. Editor: I see your point about the symbolism. And yet, look at how quickly Tholen captured the texture of the wood in the shed, the hurried, almost frantic, scratching of the pencil to render its age and the rough construction. I wonder where it was located? Was the stork’s nest planned, co-opted, incidental to someone’s structure, its function, its means of construction? Curator: These were likely rapid field sketches; a memory of landscape to revisit later. I imagine Tholen encountered this scene and was struck by its symbolic richness and captured it quickly. This fits into the late 19th-century genre painting, connecting with the Dutch landscape tradition in an almost primal way. Editor: "Primal," I like that. Because, at its core, we're seeing the intersection of the human-made and the natural, the labor that went into the shed versus the untamed, cyclical life of the stork. The sketch seems very casual and informal—and yet carefully constructed to balance those things together. Curator: Right, and to bring us back to beginnings: consider that this drawing on paper itself becomes a ground for a future artwork, like a place for further germination to grow and evolve as idea. It brings together so many possibilities… Editor: Absolutely, the sketch embodies a kind of hopeful energy about its own transformation – how something so basic can contain multitudes.