Staande vrouw met handen in haar zij c. 1915s - 1925s

Isaac Israels made this drawing of a standing woman with a pencil on paper, and what grabs me first is the speed of it. It feels like a thought captured in a flurry of marks. The lines are so raw and immediate, aren't they? Scratchy and almost nervous, they remind us that drawing is really about feeling – the pressure of the pencil, the drag on the paper, the way an idea takes shape right there in front of you. See how the dress is just a bunch of straight lines and angles, a real shorthand for form. And then her face, barely there, but still so expressive. It's like Israels is saying, "Here's what I saw, and here's how I felt about it." It’s a kind of shorthand that you see in the work of other artists who, like Israels, were interested in modern life, like Toulouse-Lautrec, perhaps. Art, in the end, is always a conversation, a way of seeing that one artist passes on to another.