Portret van Amit c. 1921

Willem Witsen made this portrait of Amit with crayon, on paper. Look at the hatch marks building the face: a wonderful face, but I want to focus on that hat. The cloth is twisted and perched right on top, springing out and up from his head. Maybe it took him a few tries, sketching, erasing, starting over, until that hat sat just right. I wonder what it was like to be Witsen, sitting there, trying to capture not just what Amit looked like, but also something about who he was. Did Witsen struggle to get the weight of the hat right? To capture the folds? The angle? I like to think of the whole history of art as just that, a conversation. A conversation between artists, between artworks, between us and them.