Zeilboten 1822 - 1893

Willem Troost created this drawing, "Zeilboten," with graphite on paper, and it is now held in the Rijksmuseum. The composition is dominated by the artist's concentration on form. The sailboats, sketched with a minimalist approach, seem to be studies in shape and line rather than attempts at realistic representation. The artist focuses on the essential forms of the sails and hulls. The texture of the graphite on paper is visible, lending a raw, immediate quality to the sketches. Troost's drawings evoke a sense of the provisional, challenging conventional artistic values that privilege the finished and polished. This invites us to question what constitutes a complete work of art and to find beauty in the fragmentary and the incomplete. This focus on the materiality and the process of creation places emphasis on how we perceive and assign value to art.