Brief aan Jan Veth Possibly 1924

This letter, Brief aan Jan Veth, was written by Karel Johan Lodewijk Alberdingk Thijm on a piece of paper in 1924. Look at the penmanship, the dark ink against the off-white paper, the way the letters lean and loop. It's like a dance, isn’t it? A dance of thoughts flowing from the writer's mind, down his arm, and onto the page. I wonder what he was thinking as he wrote. Was he smiling? Frowning? Was the nib scratching across the page, or gliding smoothly? You can almost hear the scratching, can't you? Each stroke of the pen, like a brushstroke, building up the image, the feeling, the message. This letter reminds us that art isn't just about grand gestures on huge canvases. Sometimes, it's the small, intimate acts—the quiet moments of connection between one person and another, captured in ink on paper. It's all part of the same conversation, isn't it?