Portret van een onbekende vrouw met hoed, in profiel c. 1919

Isaac Israels made this sketch of an unknown woman with a hat in profile, but when exactly, we don't know! It looks like it might be pencil on paper. What strikes me is the lightness of touch, the way the image seems to emerge, tentative and almost ghostly, from the page. Israels is all about the essential, searching for the basic lines of her face. See how the profile of her nose and lips are captured with just a few strokes, giving us the sense of a fleeting moment, as though the woman just turned her head. There's a beauty in the incompleteness, which reminds me of Whistler. It's like Israels is having a conversation with other artists across time, sharing a love for the unfinished, the suggestion, and the poetry of the everyday. It embraces ambiguity and invites us to bring our own stories and interpretations to it.