Solon H. Borglum, born Ogden, UT - House - n.d. - T-Shirt

A pen-and-ink landscape study of a steeply roofed farmhouse with a chimney, set among dense trees on a low rise of ground.

Visual Elements & Composition

The drawing is built from hatching in dark pen and pencil on cream paper. The house sits on the right, seen at an angle so that its gable end and a side wall both read clearly, with a few dark accents marking the windows and doorway. Trees and shrubs fill the left, drawn in dense, darting strokes that give their masses weight and texture. The foreground stays open, broken only by a few horizontal marks suggesting grass and uneven ground. The eye moves back and forth between the solid walls and the loose tangle of foliage.

Meaning & Symbolism

A house among trees was a familiar subject for landscape draughtsmen, who saw in the rural dwelling a point of stillness within the wider natural world. The modest scale and plain construction of this building give the sheet a quiet, domestic character. The sketch was made by Solon Hannibal Borglum (1868 to 1922), an American sculptor born in Ogden, Utah, who trained in Paris under the animalier Emmanuel Frémiet and is best known for his animal sculpture, particularly horses. Drawings like this one show his interest in the rural settings that surrounded the animals he portrayed.

Where the Drawing Meets the Shirt

Because the sketch is drawn in fine line and open cream space, it reads well at chest scale, where the house and trees hold their shape as the eye takes in the whole composition. The quiet, domestic mood carries onto the front of a tee worn through an ordinary day, the image sitting in the same easy register as the garment itself.