Portret van de vrouw van Wilhelmus Johannes Steenhoff 1873 - 1932

Wilhelmus Johannes Steenhoff captured this portrait of his wife on paper with charcoal. You can imagine him, charcoal in hand, circling around her, his eyes flitting back and forth as he translates her three-dimensional form onto a two-dimensional plane. I imagine that the artist, like any of us who have ever tried to capture a face, was looking for something beyond mere likeness. I wonder what he was thinking about as he moved the charcoal across the page? What parts of her did he linger over, and what did he rush through? Her lips are just a tiny, almost severe line, but he has given her nose a lot of attention, hasn’t he? That swooping line from her forehead to the tip of her nose—it feels like he wanted to really understand her, to get at something essential about who she was. And there's such a beautiful tenderness in the way he's drawn her hair, all soft and wispy. Through that line, Steenhoff is in conversation with the history of drawing itself.