In 1996, collector, journalist and publicist Wim Aerts offered a collection of memorabilia from the Limburg painter Charles Eyck to Van Gendt Book auctioneers. Maastricht University bought the entire collection, and in the years that followed, added some smaller purchases and gifts.
Correspondence
Aerts and Eyck had developed a friendship, reflected by their voluminous correspondence between 1977 and 1983. The library collection contains the letters that Eyck sent. This documentation collection is only available in Dutch.
The letters sent by Aerts are still in the Charles Eyck archives, managed by his son Ragnar. As Eyck came to regard Aerts as his future biographer, the correspondence contains much biographical data and opinions on almost all aspects of the artist’s life and work.
Although the collection is incomplete in many respects, it paints a clear picture of Eyck’s development as a person and an artist with all his high and low points. Particularly in his correspondence with friends he is unreserved in describing his feelings and experiences.
Pictures
Besides written material, the collection contains many pictures, many of these taken by Eyck himself. He took pictures as a source of inspiration, created photomontages for large canvases and used photos as mnemonic devices in addition to sketches and scrawls. This gives us some understanding of how much of his work was created.
The entire collection stretches approximately eight metres and has been made accessible through a classical archive inventory (website in Dutch). Also watch this video of art historian Monique Dickhaut about Charles Eyck.
Consulting copies
This collection is not available for loan. You can request items from the closed stacks and consult these in the Parlour room at the Inner City Library. In LibSearch you can browse the Charles Eyck book collection separately.