Double portrait, sitting 

Otto Scholderer sketched this ‘Double portrait, sitting’ on paper sometime in the 19th century. At first glance, the sitter, rendered in graphite, exudes a quiet, almost domestic serenity. The composition is structured by the sitter's upright posture, which contrasts with the soft, yielding forms of the cushions and fabrics surrounding her. Scholderer uses line to define shape, but also to suggest volume and texture. The network of lines creates a semiotic web, where the density and direction of each stroke contribute to the overall sense of form and space. Here, the visible presence of the artist's hand—the tentative, searching quality of the lines—challenges the notion of the portrait as a perfect likeness. Instead, it emphasizes the process of representation, subtly destabilizing conventional ideas about identity and depiction. The drawing prompts us to reconsider how we engage with the sitter's gaze, and how we perceive both the sitter's identity and our own assumptions about portraiture.