Brief aan Philip Zicken Possibly 1905

Pieter Dupont wrote this letter to Philip Zicken in 1905, probably with a dip pen and ink. You can imagine him there at his desk, the nib scratching across the page, committing his thoughts to paper. It’s just a list of prices, but so much more than that, too. It's got these beautiful, looping ascenders and descenders, the controlled chaos of handwriting filling the space. I wonder if Dupont considered this calligraphy an artwork in itself. I like to think of the letter as a score, a kind of instruction for later action, where the words, written with care and attention, are there to trigger a feeling or a memory, an embodied sense of exchange. Even an artwork. And it resonates with all the other artworks made of language and ink across time, a network of voices and marks.