Abklatsch van de krijttekening op pagina 15 1886 - 1903

This image is an offset – or ‘Abklatsch’ as the title says in Dutch – of a chalk drawing by Isaac Israels. It’s literally the residue left behind after the original drawing was pressed onto another surface. The result is blurry, ghostly. The image is barely legible, which makes you wonder, why bother? Israels was working in a moment when photography was ascendant, and though he was a painter, he also used the camera as a tool. He likely made the original drawing to fix a composition in his mind, or to study it, and then took this offset as a means of further processing the image, stripping it to its barest essentials. The value of this work lies less in its aesthetic refinement, and more in the way it reveals Israels’s working methods. It’s a kind of document, a record of the artist’s thinking. By valuing it, the museum asks us to consider the creative process itself, and not just the finished product.