Meisje met een slede met takken op het ijs 1874

This is a pencil drawing titled ‘Girl with a Sledge with Branches on the Ice’ by Willem Cornelis Rip. The work's composition is immediately striking for its simplicity. A young girl rendered in delicate strokes is pulling a sledge piled high with branches across what we can only assume to be a frozen surface. Rip uses line and shading to create a sense of form and depth. The texture of the girl's clothing, the rough-hewn sledge, and the tangled branches are all suggested through subtle variations in pressure and density of the pencil marks. The drawing emphasizes the materiality of the scene, inviting us to consider the nature of representation itself. Rip's focus is not on capturing a precise likeness, but rather on exploring the interplay of light and shadow, form and void. There is a quiet stillness to the drawing, a sense of contemplative observation that invites us to pause and reflect on the beauty of the everyday.