Brief aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1899

This is a letter to Philip Zilcken, written by Johannes de Koo on a sheet of graph paper. Letters like this are important historical documents because they give us insight into the cultural circles of artists and art critics. Zilcken was a prominent art critic in the Netherlands, and de Koo would have been invested in the reception of his work by someone like Zilcken. You can see that the letter is written on graph paper. This gives us a hint about the status of the artist and the kind of resources available to him. Was this the paper that was easiest to get ahold of? Was he perhaps an amateur artist? These are the kinds of questions that an art historian might ask when looking at a document like this. We have to look at the broader social context to understand the conditions that shape artistic production.