Studie c. 1886s

Curator: This is a page from a sketchbook by George Hendrik Breitner, titled "Studie," created around 1886. It's an ink drawing on paper, currently held in the Rijksmuseum collection. Editor: Immediately, it gives the sense of peering into the artist’s private world. A raw glimpse into his creative process, the kind that isn’t typically intended for public display. Curator: Absolutely. A sketchbook offers unparalleled insight into an artist’s mind, like an intimate visual diary. This page is filled with quickly rendered sketches and handwritten notes. Note the various geometric shapes that hint at a structural intention of composition. Editor: The fragmented notes suggest an interest in mapping space, perhaps locations in the city, indicating Breitner's connection to a specific urban landscape, one filled with potential, of places that still exist today but are unseen. Curator: The immediacy of the medium – ink on paper, done most probably very quickly – reflects a modern desire to capture a fleeting moment, an essence or vibration. Think of it in conversation with photography at this time. Breitner was actually very fascinated by it! Editor: Speaking of vibrations, these seemingly disjointed drawings resonate together – notes, dimensions, half-formed architectural blocks—creating a silent chorus for how people lived and labored at the time, whose presence is implied in all these sketches, even if it's by way of a trace. How else would this building or that street come into being, if not for this presence? Curator: What fascinates me is the simultaneity – the convergence of the rational, with notes and measurements, and the emotional response, through loose sketch-like quality. Editor: I'm drawn to the idea of seeing these not just as building sketches, but symbols, perhaps a record of what exists and what is intended. How society and community is formed. It makes you reflect on progress, doesn’t it? Curator: It really does. Each of those little sketch books is like a small window into the way artists see and experience reality, isn’t it? Editor: Exactly. It’s an ongoing, never-ending story, inscribed through these sketches—one in which we continue to inscribe ourselves even now.