77. Isaac Israels

The ‘Witsenarchief’, passed on in 1954 by the Witsenhuis in Amsterdam to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, is one of its most researched collections of letters. This is not surprising, since the painter, etcher, draughtsman and photographer Willem Witsen was the central figure of the ‘band of Eighty’. Not least because, unlike most of his companions, he had no financial worries and supported his friends in many ways. In the early eighties the Ewijkshoeve near Zeist was a hospitable resort for his group of friends, a meeting place that was moved in 1891 to his studio in Oosterpark- straat - still partly kept in its original state - where they could drink, smoke, play chess, paint and stay the night. A member of the club not equally appreciated by all the others was Isaac Israels, with whom Willem Witsen was to remain friends until he died. The letter shown on the opposite page was written by Israels when he was staying in Hamburg with Arij Prins, not an unqualified success: ‘Have you ever heard of anyone wanting to visit London and actually going to Hamburg? I haven't. The colours of some things here are so ugly as to be impossible to imagine in Holland. What I do like are the carts, barges, chunks of the city, red light districts at night admirable, but the girls over there are damned insolent’. In the following comparison between the Hamburg and Amsterdam girls of easy virtue a number of words have been carefully blackened so as to make them illegible; Witsen obviously found some things too frankly worded to preserve them uncensored for posterity. The greatest charm of the letter lies not so much in the text as in the sketches drawn with a few fast strokes of the pen. Regrettably, however, Israels must have used the worst possible writing paper made at the time, in combination with a fairly aggressive ink. Acidification and ink corrosion have left their indelible marks. 

It is no coincidence that the Witsen archives are now in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek: they came to join the impressive archives of the Nieuwe Gids, the mouthpiece of the Eighties Movement, already in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek since 1939. Witsen had contributed a number of art reviews to the Nieuwe Gids under the pen names of W.J. van Westervoorde and Verberchem.

Literature

• R. van der Wiel. Ewijkshoeve, tuin van tachtig. Amsterdam 1988
• Ch. Vergeer. Toen werden schoot en boezem lekkernij. Erotiek van de Tachtigers. Amsterdam 1990, afb. op p. 115.