Aantekeningen over landbouw en berekeningen 1854 - 1868

Curator: We’re looking at “Aantekeningen over landbouw en berekeningen,” or “Notes on Agriculture and Calculations,” a mixed-media drawing crafted between 1854 and 1868 by Johannes Tavenraat. It resides here at the Rijksmuseum. Editor: My first thought is that it resembles a page torn from a ledger or journal. The close, careful script gives it a secretive, personal feel, as if glimpsing private thoughts. The materials also look really simple and modest. Curator: Absolutely. Pen and ink on paper - humble tools to record very particular observations, these notations of agricultural yields have a strong echo of earlier Dutch Golden Age bookkeeping, especially genre paintings showing financial record-keeping that would indicate meticulous monitoring, which in turn reflects the importance of agriculture in society. Editor: Indeed. One cannot ignore the raw economic and social relations. Consider the ink, for instance – what type, where was it sourced, and what were the environmental costs involved in its creation? This connects directly to systems of resource extraction and manufacturing processes tied into land ownership and agriculture. Curator: Good point. The notations themselves, beyond simple calculation, likely had symbolic weight. Each calculation represents labour, exchange, even the ebb and flow of nature viewed as resources, abstracted for processing. One could even see these are an early form of environmental record-keeping, when a sustainable accounting depended on regional growth, long before terms such as the “Anthropocene.” Editor: Right, and there's labor implicit here too, right? The unseen toil that went into those harvests. How much physical work for a yield like this? In fact, these pen markings document not merely economic calculations, but human input translated into numerical terms and neatly entered for purposes such as taxation. Curator: And of course, this relates back to Tavenraat and to an enduring Dutch fascination with agrarian painting. It speaks to how we use numbers and symbols to codify our relationship to the natural world, transforming observations into codified abstractions that shape future realities. Editor: Thinking about materials and marks… all this is about production. It lets us look past the finished artwork, considering where it came from in all its social, economical, and also human costs.