Gezicht van een vrouw 1875 - 1934

Isaac Israels made this drawing, Gezicht van een vrouw, with pencil on paper, sometime around the turn of the last century. Israels is working something out here, not so much how this woman looks but how you make a likeness on paper. There is a real tenderness in the lines describing her face, but then, also a kind of brutality, or at least a lack of concern for the preciousness of the image, with the scribbled out areas around her. He is searching for a form, finding and losing it at the same time. The smudged areas read almost like atmosphere, as if we are glimpsing the woman through a fog of unknowing. It makes me think of Degas, in the way he used pastel not to prettify a scene, but to suggest movement, uncertainty, and the provisional nature of seeing. Art is less a depiction of what we know, and more a journey into what we don’t.