Dutch Modernism: Jan Sluijters
Clothed Model, Lying Down (Gekleed model, liggend), ca. 1906/1907
Colored pencil, colored chalk, watercolor, and ink
17.8 × 25.4 cm
Auctioned

Jan Sluijters (1881–1957) was in the midst of his most exploratory years when this tender drawing was made, a period in which he pushed himself restlessly toward new ways of seeing and recording the world. His stay in Paris in 1906, made possible by the Prix de Rome scholarship he had won two years earlier, proved decisive. The city’s quickening artistic pulse—its cafés, studios, and late‑night conversations—opened something in him. His work shifted almost overnight from academic precision to a freer, more intuitive language shaped by Fauvism’s daring colour and the avant‑garde’s hunger for renewal.

In this small, intimate sheet, that transformation feels close at hand. The model’s curled posture, with her knees drawn gently toward her chest, introduces a quiet vulnerability that feels unusually tender for Sluijters at this moment. Her pink blouse and softly striped skirt bring a domestic, almost private note into the composition, as if we are witnessing a moment not staged but simply found.

The reclining model is rendered with a softness that suggests both observation and affection, the coloured pencil and chalk moving lightly across the paper as if Sluijters were testing how far he could let go of strict contour. You can see him letting the blue of the stockings and the deep indigo shadow behind her bleed into one another, creating a soft halo that holds the figure in place without enclosing her. It’s a small but telling experiment in atmosphere rather than outline.

The washes of watercolor breathe warmth into the figure, while the ink lines, still carrying traces of his illustrative background, anchor the composition with a gentle clarity. It is a moment of transition made visible: the academic draughtsman loosening his grip, the modernist emerging.

During these Paris months Sluijters lived at the modest Hôtel Chaptal, just steps from Montmartre’s cafés and dance halls—Rat Mort, Bal Tabarin, the Moulin Rouge—places where colour, movement, and spectacle spilled into the streets. He absorbed everything. His academic training, his experience as an illustrator, and the bold new techniques he encountered in the French capital began to intermingle, creating the distinctive hybrid that would define his early modernist voice. This drawing, with its mixture of delicacy and bold colour, feels like something he might have made in that rented room—quiet, close to the model, the city’s noise softened behind the walls.

This drawing, almost certainly made during his 1906–1907 stay, carries that atmosphere with it. It feels like a private study made in a quiet room while the city hummed outside, a work in which Sluijters allowed himself to experiment gently, to explore the expressive possibilities of line and colour before they would erupt more boldly in his later Parisian canvases. Even in its modest scale, the sheet carries the warmth of a moment observed with real attentiveness, a glimpse of the young artist learning to trust the expressive power of colour and tenderness.