Vrouwenhoofd 1875 - 1934

Isaac Israels made this drawing, Vrouwenhoofd, with pencil on paper, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. I love the tentative, searching quality of the line work. You can see Israels feeling his way around the form, almost as if he's sculpting the head out of thin air. Look at the way he's built up the shadows on the face, those tight little hatch marks giving the head weight and volume. It’s like he's mapping the terrain of her face, discovering its contours one stroke at a time. And then there's that scribble of lines around her hair and collar, so loose and free, suggesting form without defining it too precisely. Israels was part of the Amsterdam Impressionism movement. Think of other sketchers of the period like Constantin Guys or even Toulouse-Lautrec, all capturing fleeting moments with an economy of line. This sketch has this feeling, as if the artist is inviting us to participate in the act of seeing, to co-create the image with him. Art’s like that, you know, a conversation across time and space.