Seated Female Nude c. 1915s - 1925s

Isaac Israels made this sketch of a seated female nude with graphite on paper. It feels so immediate, doesn't it? Like he just had to get it down, right then. I can imagine Israels moving quickly, trying to capture the pose before it shifted. The lines are so economical, describing form and shadow with a kind of shorthand. See how the lines around her arm suggest its weight and curve? It's about the physicality of being in the room with the model. It's as if Israels wanted to see how little he could do to make a thing appear. Israels was part of a generation of artists who were pushing beyond academic convention, trying to find new ways of representing the world. You see this desire in the work of other artists at the time like Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. And of course, artists still learn from artists today. What would it be like to draw like this yourself?