Man met kruiwagen 1896 - 1897

George Hendrik Breitner sketched "Man met kruiwagen" in graphite on notebook paper. The composition immediately strikes us with its mirrored symmetry, bisected by the spine of the notebook. This division creates a dialogue between near-identical images, suggesting repetition, yet subtly distorted through the artist’s hand. The sketch depicts a man with a wheelbarrow, but it teeters on abstraction. Lines are economical, capturing the essence of form rather than precise detail. Breitner plays with positive and negative space, using the white of the paper to define shapes as much as the graphite lines themselves. The wheelbarrow, centrally located, becomes almost a symbolic form. This sketch is not merely a study of a man and his tool, but an exploration of form and representation, an intersection between realism and the emerging abstract language of early modernism. The mirrored presentation destabilizes a fixed viewpoint, pushing viewers to question the representation of everyday life.