Gezicht op gebouwen in Amsterdam, mogelijk aan de Reguliersgracht 1886 - 1923

This drawing of buildings in Amsterdam, maybe on the Reguliersgracht, was made by George Hendrik Breitner with pencil on paper. It's so exciting to see the artist's process laid bare like this, all the starts and stops, the searching lines. The texture of the paper really comes through, doesn't it? You can almost feel the tooth of it grabbing at the pencil. And look at the way Breitner uses line – thick, thin, dark, light. It’s all about capturing a feeling, an impression, rather than a photographic likeness. See that cluster of vertical and horizontal marks near the center? It's like the artist is wrestling with the architecture, trying to pin it down, but also letting it breathe. It reminds me a bit of Philip Guston’s messy, searching drawings, that same sense of an artist thinking through their hand. Art's not about answers, right? It's about the questions.