Schetsboek XIV met 17 bladen 1875 - 1934

This is Isaac Israels’ sketchbook from around 1895, held at the Rijksmuseum. What a wonderfully unassuming object! It’s a little blue book, a humble container for ideas. It feels like the beginning of something, like potential energy. There's a faint trace of graphite underneath that blue, an almost-there quality to the marks. I love the idea of the sketchbook as a space for half-formed thoughts. Think of it as a place for visual note-taking; loose, gestural, and immediate. You can see the ghost of the artist’s hand moving across the page. Look at the way the blue of the cover is scuffed and worn, revealing the texture of the paper beneath. It is reminiscent of Vuillard’s intimate, domestic scenes, where the everyday is elevated through close observation. This simple object reminds us that art is as much about process as it is about the final product, about the conversation an artist has with their materials. And that, in itself, is a beautiful thought.