Paard en een schip Possibly 1907 - 1911

George Hendrik Breitner made this drawing, "Paard en een schip" with pencil in hand at some point in his life. You can see the horse and ship and other details emerge from the page, like ghosts. Looking at this work, I see an artist who’s thinking through the process of image making. There's a real energy in the marks; they feel provisional, like one thought is immediately crossing out or correcting another. I love the physicality of the medium here, the way the pencil scratches across the paper. On the left side you have that dense patch of hatching that suggests the horse's head, almost like a shadow. And look at the ship; Breitner outlines just enough to suggest its form, leaving the rest to our imagination. For me, Breitner’s drawing style puts me in mind of Manet, who also embraced a sense of immediacy and unfinishedness in his work. It reminds us that art is an ongoing conversation, full of possibilities, rather than a quest for fixed answers.