Gestileerd dier met gekrulde staart 1884 - 1952

Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries made this drawing of a stylized animal with a curled tail, using ink on paper. The animal has such an intriguing shape. I can almost feel the scratching of the pen across the surface, each line building up the form. I bet de Vries wasn't entirely sure where he was going with this piece at first. Maybe he started with the tail—that perfect little swirl—and let the rest of the creature emerge from there. It reminds me of some of Matisse’s drawings – that same sense of playful simplicity, of capturing the essence of a form with just a few well-placed lines. You can see him working through ideas, testing out shapes, and letting intuition guide his hand. It's like he's having a conversation with the paper, each mark a response to the last. And that’s what art is, right? A constant dialogue between artists, across time and space. We're all just riffing off each other, trying to make sense of the world in our own way.