Voyeurs and ghosts

To be an art historian is to a certain extent to be a voyeur. At the moment I am spending my time reading letters written by nineteenth-century artists. By reading them I learn about their daily lives, the (in)ability to finish a painting, the manner in which they keep in contact with their art dealer - often a hate love relationship -, with their friends and family. I read about their tiredness, illness and joys. At times I am ashamed to go through someone's love letters, be witness to someone's grief, It is as if I were reading one of those awful magazines. However, mostly artists correspondence is very mundane, dealing with appointments, money problems, actually the things that keep us - in our twentyfirst-century lives - busy as well, and I forget my embarrasment.

Letter by Felicien Rops to Anon., 24 October 1896, coll. Fondation Custodia, Paris

The letters make the artists human, Often more so than the books, articles and exhibitions have done. Writers, art dealers, curators, and the artists themselves did their best to create a lot of mirrors and smoke, which turned the artist into a superhero, whether tragic or successful. By combining both, the image of the artist becomes more nuanced.

And I, I am the treasure hunter, the detective, trying to find scraps of information on which I can build my story on nineteenth-century Dutch artists in Paris. I am searching for the artist's reactions to the city of Paris, how his views on art might have changed thanks to his stay in the capital of France, how his location in the city could have influenced his manner of thinking and many other things that I think might be important to my understanding the motivation of these artists.

While I ride through Paris on my bike (indeed my Dutch bike, which I brought with me) I am starting to recognize streetnames where Dutch artists lived: the Rue du Dragon where Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer lived, the Rue Marcadet where Jacob and Matthijs Maris and for a short while David Artz rented a house (In 1867 it was the countryside, nowadays it is filled with modern appartments, although if you look closely enough you can still find nineteenth-century traces), the Rue Lepic where Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo lived. Some houses are still standing, and are even museums which can be visited nowadays such as Ary Scheffers studio and house on the Rue Chaptal.

I am following in the footsteps of these nineteenth-century ghosts, reading their letters, walking through streets, to see if I can't conjure them up in the here and now. At the same time I realize more and more that I might be the ghost, shifting in and out of focus in nineteenth-century Parisian streets, reading letters over artists' shoulders while they sit at their breakfast tables opening their morning post. It is as if time and space are becoming permeable and Paris is slowly turning into one of those children's toys in which two images are laid over one another and by moving the picture one or the other shifts into focus. The difficulty, of course, is to see both images at the same time so that they become a different way in which we see ourselves as well as these nineteenth-century artists.