Brief aan Jan Weissenbruch Possibly 1854

This is a letter from Isaac Weissenbruch to Jan Weissenbruch, made in 1864. The letter is decorated with little illustrations in the margins. What’s so interesting about this letter is the way it intertwines personal correspondence with the visual codes of Dutch civic identity. We see this in the architectural drawings, such as cityscapes of Amsterdam and Delft, which evoke pride in Dutch urban life, commerce, and the historical importance of these centers. They reference the institutional structures of Dutch society and the visual culture of the time, in which the art world was becoming more codified, more public, and more subject to the forces of the market. The presence of these civic images in a personal letter suggests that individual identity was deeply entwined with civic pride. We need the kind of painstaking archival research that can shed light on the social context of this artwork. And we must remember that the meaning of art is always contingent on the social and institutional context in which it was made.