Meisje, mogelijk op straat 1893

George Hendrik Breitner sketched this girl, possibly in the street, using graphite on paper. The directness of Breitner’s sketch brings to mind the Realist movement, whose artists found beauty in the everyday lives of common people. Breitner worked in Amsterdam at a time when the Industrial Revolution had brought rapid growth but also social inequality. The image hints at that inequality: is the girl waiting, resting, or perhaps homeless? Such quick sketches would have been made in a private sketchbook, not for public display. The artist would likely have used the sketch to create a more formal composition. The Rijksmuseum is now the institution that preserves the drawing. The meaning we find in the drawing is inevitably shaped by this institutional context. To understand the drawing fully, we might consider how the Realists related to older traditions of genre painting. We could also look at sociological studies of poverty in Amsterdam at the time.