Brief aan Philip Zilcken 1851 - 1924

This postcard was written by Carel Nicolaas Storm van 's-Gravesande and sent from The Hague in 1885. It offers us a small window into the artistic circles of the time, and the institutions that connected them. Storm van 's-Gravesande was a Dutch artist, and this card is addressed to a Monsieur Philip Zilcken, who was likely another artist, critic or collector with ties to the Dutch art world. The presence of the stamps and postal markings tells us something about the infrastructure that enabled communication and exchange across Europe at the time. The Rijksmuseum's acquisition and preservation of this mundane object elevates it to the status of a historical document. To understand the significance of this postcard, we might investigate the correspondence and archives of figures like Storm van 's-Gravesande. This helps us to reconstruct the networks of relationships that underpinned the art world in the late 19th century. The meaning of art resides not only in individual masterpieces, but in the web of social and institutional relations that surround them.