Drawings
Tens of thousands of drawings — preparatory studies, finished works on paper, watercolors, and pastel. Dutch 17th-century drawings are a particular strength.
The Dutch eye, caught in the act of sketching.
drawing is where a Dutch artist worked out a problem in private before committing it to the public medium of paint — the fall of light on a sleeve, the lean of a figure in the street. The Republic's draughtsmanship was a particular strength, and remains one here.
The instinct is always the same: fix a fleeting thing on paper before it moves. You see it in a seventeenth-century chalk study and again, two centuries on, in Breitner's rain-slicked Amsterdam and Isaac Israels's quick snatches of city life.
