Paard met een juk c. 1892 - 1923

This sketch of a horse with a yoke was made by George Hendrik Breitner sometime between 1857 and 1923 with graphite on paper. You can see it here at the Rijksmuseum. It’s a super spare, almost diagrammatic drawing, right? You can see Breitner feeling his way around the subject, testing out lines, trying to capture the essence of this working animal. There's a sense of searching here, a kind of beautiful, tentative exploration. The ghostly under-drawing on the left really evokes the pentimento of painting. You can almost hear the scratch of the graphite on the page, the artist thinking through the form. I imagine Breitner stopping, looking, drawing, stopping again. Thinking. He’s probably made so many of these, but each one holds a little piece of his thought process. The drawing resonates with the work of other artists, such as Degas, who were interested in capturing fleeting moments. It's all part of this ongoing conversation artists have, across time, constantly inspiring each other.