Meubel, mogelijk een tafel 1886 - 1923

Here's a sketch of a piece of furniture, maybe a table, made by George Hendrik Breitner sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. It was made with graphite on paper, and you can see it today at the Rijksmuseum. The linear marks feel spontaneous, as though the artist were thinking on the page. It’s like watching the furniture emerge bit by bit, through trial, error, and intuition. I wonder if Breitner was struck by the form of a table he saw in passing, prompting him to pull out his sketchbook and capture its essence? You can almost feel the artist's hand moving rapidly across the page, trying to keep up with his thoughts. The measurements scrawled beneath suggest a desire to understand the object in a deeper way, to deconstruct and then reconstruct it. This piece reminds me of other artists who use drawing as a tool for exploration. It’s all about engaging in a conversation across time, where artists inspire one another’s creativity. Painting, like drawing, is a form of embodied expression, embracing ambiguity and allowing for multiple readings.