Annotaties 1884 - 1886

George Hendrik Breitner created this page of annotations with graphite on paper sometime before his death in 1923. The scribbled notes and calculations offer a peek into the artist's daily life in the Netherlands. Breitner was deeply embedded in Amsterdam’s social fabric, documenting the city and its people. Trained at the Rijksakademie, he broke away from traditional academic painting, aligning himself with a more gritty, realist aesthetic, influenced by the social consciousness of his time. His interest in the everyday aligns him with the emerging cultural value of modern life. These informal notes humanize Breitner. They remind us that artists, even those celebrated in institutions like the Rijksmuseum, engage in mundane tasks. They also remind us of the importance of archives in piecing together the social and economic conditions that shape artistic production. By consulting letters, receipts, and other ephemera, the art historian can reconstruct the world in which Breitner lived and worked, offering insight into the public role of art and the politics of imagery.