Afgemeerde roeiboten in een sloot 1893 - 1894

Editor: This is Pieter Dupont's etching "Afgemeerde roeiboten in een sloot," or "Moored Rowboats in a Ditch," from around 1893-94. It's a small print, a very intimate scene of these old boats just sitting there. What do you see in this piece, particularly with your iconographic perspective? Curator: The image pulses with a sense of melancholy. Water, in its symbolic depths, is often tied to memory, to the ebb and flow of time. And what do boats represent? Journeys, departures, but here, stasis. The boats, clearly weathered, suggest lives lived, stories whispered on the water. They're no longer in active use; they have an anthropomorphic sense of aging, would you agree? Editor: Yes, definitely. They feel almost discarded, but also… peaceful? It’s a strange combination. Curator: It is a powerful pairing. Consider the ditch: is it a boundary, a grave, a reflection? Water and vessels offer passage between states of being. These images, repeated over centuries, sink into our cultural memory and resurface unexpectedly in moments like this. What about the linear elements: do the etched lines evoke the actual lines of boats, water, and foliage, or also something more ethereal? Editor: I think it’s both. The lines capture the textures of the boats and the water, but they also give the scene a dreamlike quality, as if we are peering into a memory. Curator: Precisely. It asks: what voyages might those boats have undertaken? And what awaits us when we, too, are eventually moored? Editor: That is quite an image – thank you, that’s given me a lot to think about.