Abklatsch van de krijttekening op blad 14 recto 1887 - 1934

Isaac Israels made this chalk drawing on paper at an unknown date. It’s this ghostly image, right? Like a half-remembered dream. Israels builds up this barely-there image with these soft, smudgy marks. It’s like he’s coaxing the image out of the paper, bit by bit. Look at the way the chalk sort of dissolves into the page, especially towards the bottom. There's a real sensitivity to the material here, a sense of touch. He's not trying to hide the process, but rather, making it part of the experience. It’s like the drawing is in the process of becoming and disappearing all at once. Israels’ contemporary, James McNeill Whistler, was similarly interested in the poetry of tonal arrangements. But where Whistler aimed for a precise harmony, Israels seems to embrace a more open-ended, provisional quality. To me, that’s what makes this little drawing so compelling: its willingness to be unfinished, uncertain.