Gezicht op de Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal te Amsterdam 1910

Here is a drawing by George Hendrik Breitner made with crayon on paper depicting a street in Amsterdam. I imagine Breitner standing on a cold morning with the stub of a crayon in his hand. He must have worked fast to capture the scene so economically. Look how the marks gather and disperse—a jumble of hatching in the buildings on the right compared to the bare paper suggesting the wide street. The marks build form but also keep it open. I get a sense of transience, as if everything is about to change. Breitner's contemporaries like Van Gogh were similarly preoccupied with conveying the emotional and psychological states of modern life through an economy of means, but Breitner, like many artists then and now, was interested in capturing something of the everyday.