Meubel, mogelijk een tafel 1886 - 1923

George Hendrik Breitner made this drawing of a maybe-table with pencil on paper. What strikes me is the pure, unadulterated process on display. The thing about drawings is that they aren't about slick surfaces or illusionism. It's more about the architecture of seeing, the choreography of hand and eye working something out. Here, the materiality is humble. We get the grainy texture of the paper, the soft sheen of graphite, a sense of the artist’s breath right on the surface. Look at how Breitner approaches the legs of the table, all these sketchy, almost hesitant lines trying to find the form. It’s like he's thinking aloud, letting us in on his private search for the essence of the object. This reminds me a little of Morandi's still-life drawings, you know? Both artists share this quiet intensity, this way of making the ordinary feel profound. And just like those drawings, Breitner's humble sketch is more about the act of seeing than the thing being seen.