Strandstoel en een figuur met een hoed 1890 - 1946

This is a drawing, made by Cornelis Vreedenburgh. The beach chair, rendered with a few lines, looks like a diagram for something you might construct yourself out of driftwood and twine. The lines are hesitant, searching, like the artist is feeling their way through the subject, figuring it out as they go. Down below, we see a figure with a hat, barely there, a ghost of a person enjoying a day at the beach. It’s like a memory, fleeting and incomplete. I’m drawn to the way the artist captures the essence of the scene with such minimal means. There’s a sense of lightness and openness in the work. The emptiness of the paper becomes part of the drawing. Thinking of other beach scenes done by later artists like David Hockney come to mind, but Hockney's are fully formed images, bold and vivid. Vreedenburgh is showing us something more fragile, more tentative, a mere suggestion of a moment in time. It is this embrace of uncertainty that makes this little sketch so captivating.