Brief aan onbekend Possibly 1845 - 1847

This letter was written by Ary Johannes Lamme, a Dutch painter, draughtsman and museum curator, in the nineteenth century. The letter is addressed to a Mr. Theo Vincent. The image is full of the codes and conventions of nineteenth-century life, the handwritten cursive, the formal phrasing, and the concern for the addressee's affairs. As a museum curator, Lamme was clearly an active participant in the institutional art world of the Netherlands. This was a time of burgeoning nationalism, with institutions like museums taking on a key role in shaping a shared cultural identity. Letters like this help us to reconstruct those networks of exchange, and to understand the social conditions that shaped artistic production in this period. Historians use archival sources such as letters, exhibition catalogues, and institutional records to get a more complete understanding of the artwork's context. By examining the letter and the lives of the people behind it, we can better understand the social history of art.