Gezicht op het Rokin in Amsterdam c. 1903

This is George Hendrik Breitner’s sketch of the Rokin in Amsterdam, made sometime in his lifetime with pencil on paper. It’s all about how he gets the image down, a kind of mapping out. Look at the texture of the paper itself, you can see the lines made in the paper, so this might have been in a sketchbook. The line work is not about contour or detail, but about massing and volume. See how those almost horizontal marks stack up, forming an architectural mass? It's like he's feeling his way through the scene, grabbing the basics, leaving the rest for later. It reminds me of some of Philip Guston’s quick sketches – that same urgency to capture the bones of a subject, the sense of art as a continual searching, not a finished statement.