Staande man met lange jas, hoed en wandelstok 1778 - 1838

Curator: Isn't there something wonderfully haunting about this piece? A man in a long coat, hat, and cane rendered with the sparsest of lines...It feels like a fleeting shadow, doesn’t it? Editor: It does have an ephemeral quality, doesn't it? This is "Standing Man with Long Coat, Hat and Walking Stick." The work comes to us from Anthonie van den Bos, and while his exact birth and death dates are uncertain, we can place this print roughly between 1778 and 1838. Curator: Between shadows and emerging possibilities...It reminds me of a figure caught between eras, his coat and hat suggesting a sense of status, yet the sketchiness lends a feeling of being incomplete, even vulnerable. Like a ghost just barely solidifying in the dawn light. Editor: The sketchiness actually highlights interesting elements of class and representation. Note the careful etching of the coat's form and fabric. His walking stick wasn't merely functional, but it signified bourgeois status, right? Curator: Exactly! Yet the incompleteness gives the whole piece an open feeling, a “what if…?” Hanging in the air. It gives you a feeling like there are a multitude of options and directions still available to him. Editor: Van den Bos probably saw him, and countless other subjects, from a similarly skewed position in the class hierarchy. Here he seems to want to suggest that there is some sort of humanity, whether the subject sees it in himself or not. Curator: Right, but this could be totally fictional as well. Perhaps he was sketching characters that came from novels of the time? Editor: Sure, and perhaps, from this angle, the fictional origins of social categories. Perhaps this is less about solid individuals and more about representations. The question might be why. Why render this character? What is he trying to capture beyond appearances? Curator: I see him lingering there with the potential to be anything or go anywhere. All possibilities contained in one sketched breath. Editor: And I see the artist reaching for him. A member of a rising class trying to define itself through representation, sketching its own path through images of authority and maybe even self-mockery. A perfect echo for our current confusions. Curator: Right, that’s so interesting. There he stands, as we also stand here in our modern chaos, and it's as if these many years collapse and he is there alongside us!