Briefkaart aan Philip Zilcken before 1893

This is the back of a postcard sent to Philip Zilcken by Albert Baertsoen, likely around 1892 given the postmark from that year. It is held in the Rijksmuseum today as part of the Zilcken collection. Postcards like these, which exploded in popularity at the end of the 19th century, reveal a lot about the social networks of artists and the circulation of images at the time. Consider the roles of institutions like the postal service, which helped make artistic exchange more fluid across geographical boundaries, and museums, which began to collect and display these everyday objects as documents of cultural history. Baertsoen's choice to communicate via postcard also speaks to a shift in artistic practice. The informality of the medium contrasts with the more rigid structures of the art world. To fully understand this piece, we might delve into archival records of artist correspondence or explore exhibition histories to trace how such ephemera found its way into museum collections, blurring the lines between public and private, high and low culture.