Studieblad met kop van een meisje, naar rechts, van bovenaf gezien c. 1633

Curator: I'd like to draw your attention to "Studieblad met kop van een meisje, naar rechts, van bovenaf gezien," or "Study Sheet with a Girl's Head, Facing Right, Seen from Above," a drawing by Gerard ter Borch II from around 1633. It's currently held here at the Rijksmuseum. Editor: There's a quiet intimacy about it, isn't there? A sense of stillness. I’m immediately drawn to the texture created simply with pencil on paper, how he evokes cloth and hair with just line and shade. Curator: Precisely. Ter Borch’s sketches often explore nuanced emotional states, rendered visible through small details like the tilt of the head or the fall of light. The girl's downturned gaze suggests a reflective, perhaps even melancholy mood—an exploration of youthful interiority. The turban adds to the sense of mystery, playing into the vogue for exoticism popular at the time. Editor: The choice of pencil is so interesting. It's such a direct medium. No layering of oils, no glazes. It speaks of immediate access to the subject. I am left thinking of the type of paper too and how crucial that must have been. And look at the wear around the edges—it speaks to the drawing being something that was kept in a studio or held often, a valued reference, not a finished piece, in and of itself, but perhaps something that may become another thing eventually. Curator: The baroque period had a renewed interest in realism but the quick study provides the most interesting data for us to appreciate the level of detail sought out at the time to depict life and class. This image certainly evokes the cultural obsession for high social portraiture, and these details we have reviewed together bring us closer to fully understand the image making enterprise that involved paper, labor and subject matter. Editor: It certainly makes me appreciate how carefully crafted even the most “casual” of images often are. I leave wondering about what we are drawn to when a subject is gazing slightly out of sight. It’s haunting in the best way. Curator: Indeed. It provides such great context into that moment when an image leaves an artist’s mind into this material dimension where is now capable to affect ourselves too.