Gracht met een ophaalbrug te Amsterdam 1890 - 1946

This sketch of a canal with a drawbridge in Amsterdam was done by Cornelis Vreedenburgh, using pencil on paper. The lines are so delicate, like he barely touched the paper, but the image is dense. Look at the way the dark cross-hatching defines the buildings on the right, solid and blocky. It’s a study in contrasts with the rest of the scene that is more ethereal. There’s a real sense of the artist’s hand, the immediacy of the sketch, all those tiny marks adding up to something bigger. It’s almost like he’s mapping out the space, figuring it out as he goes. You can see where he’s gone over lines, correcting, adjusting, as if trying to capture the essence of the place. For me, this work is reminiscent of some of Picasso’s early cityscapes. There's a similar sense of a city being built up from marks on a page. But unlike Picasso, Vreedenburgh leaves a lot unsaid, and that’s what makes it so compelling. It embraces the beauty of the unfinished, the potential of the unsaid.