Gezicht op de Oudezijds Kolk te Amsterdam en een gezicht op een straat met vlaggen c. 1900 - 1901

Curator: This work by George Hendrik Breitner, around 1900-1901, offers us two pencil sketches on a single page: one, a "Gezicht op de Oudezijds Kolk te Amsterdam," and another, "een gezicht op een straat met vlaggen"—both cityscapes. Editor: They're wonderfully fleeting. These sketches have an almost ethereal quality, like memories glimpsed through a haze. The cityscape on the left feels so immediate, raw, while the other, all vague gestures toward form and figures, reads like the ghost of a street scene. Curator: Exactly. And that immediacy is heightened, I think, by the fact that it's just pencil on paper. The visible, hasty strokes really capture the dynamism Breitner was so well-known for. He isn’t interested in pristine rendering but instead jots down, one could say, the sensations of a place. Editor: Well, those sensations are deeply tied to symbolism, for me. In the Oudezijds Kolk drawing, I see the weight of history—a dense layering of architectural forms suggesting endurance, survival. Those verticals convey a palpable feeling of constriction, human presence packed into a limited space. That makes the drawing of the street on the right even more potent, a contrast in public and private spaces, and those nearly-illegible vertical strokes of the flag suggest how even national identity wavers in lived memory. Curator: An interesting duality. You sense constriction, I feel the quick hand, the brief encounter. It feels so much more about the ephemeral nature of observation itself, an artist chasing light and form. These aren’t solid pronouncements, are they, but passing glimpses, as those streets existed at that time? The flags on the right, although sketched very rapidly, convey an attitude. Editor: Well, I think those attitudes ARE the key, that intersection of how something exists and what it represents. Take these home, pin them up in an entryway, you tell your visitor your own secrets about these sketches. The drawing makes it something potent and immediate again. Curator: What a splendidly different way to look at it all.