Gezicht op Osnabrück, vanaf de Musenburg Possibly 1864 - 1868

Curator: This is Jan Striening’s “View of Osnabrück from the Musenburg,” likely created between 1864 and 1868. It’s a cityscape rendered in pencil. Editor: My first impression is a sense of stillness, despite all the rooftops. It feels very light, almost ethereal. Look how finely he's controlled the pencil to get this delicate view. Curator: Striening’s landscapes often documented burgeoning urban environments. They served not just as artistic representations, but also as a record of civic and economic transformation in the region. How spaces were understood, managed, and marketed played a role in this shift. Editor: Right, the drawing medium itself plays into that! The quick, precise lines, suggest efficiency and recording. It shows how industrial development became visible through an increased volume of readily accessible paper. Striening used a simple pencil, but the drawing still shows an industrializing landscape with all its materiality: smoke, construction, timber. Curator: Interesting point. One also can’t ignore the social aspect of viewing a cityscape from a distance, from the Musenburg as it suggests in the title, to get that wider, broader image. It offers a controlled gaze, fitting within the emerging norms of the time as new modes of seeing and regulating social behavior emerged. Editor: It makes you wonder about the labour. Pencils like these would have been readily made for these types of sketches, so in addition to Striening as an individual artist, there's a factory of labourers whose production feeds directly into Striening's practice and the visual vocabulary of this landscape. Curator: Absolutely. And the relatively modest scale speaks volumes about its accessibility. A drawing like this could be easily reproduced or collected. So, considering Striening, pencils, paper, Osnabrück and all their stories... this innocuous scene hints at far bigger operations that shift both how people live and make. Editor: Yes. Thinking about material and method really changes how we look at this ostensibly traditional landscape. It speaks volumes!