The Painter and the Girl

"Yes, and we have a lot to account for, I’m almost sorry to say! For all the success of the Dutch Republic, it’s not always a nice time to wander around imaginatively in your head. In many ways, it was quite harsh. In Holland, there’s been a discussion on whether we could still use the term ‘The Golden Age’, because the seventeenth century had so many black sides: war crimes, submission, slavery, violence. I think we can still use the term, because what Dutch burgers and artists achieved was exceptionally brilliant. But we shouldn’t forget Rembrandt lived in cruel times. In Schama’s book, we are invited to meander around, experiencing another time—in some ways familiar, in other ways alien—in much the same way we are invited into another world from ours in the Painter and The Girl , a genuine work of historical fiction. This is simply a beautiful evocation of imaginary lives, or the imagined lives of true historical figures, both ordinary individuals and extraordinary personalities of the time. Rembrandt is actually never named in the novel. We are only told about ‘the painter’, which itself is an interesting detail. He’s such a massive historical figure that we understand immediately who the author is talking about. She doesn’t even need to name him. This book has been translated into ten languages but not into English. I am confident it will be, for its many qualities. I’ve read several historical novels on Rembrandt, or in which Rembrandt plays a leading role, and they almost always fail in my opinion. Because I know so much about him, there are simply too many flaws for me to take the work seriously; it just doesn’t feel right. However, with Margriet de Moor the opposite is true. She was able to use her imagination to create an immediate feeling of the time and place. Reading this book was like walking into the mind of Rembrandt. De Moor follows the painter’s intuition just right. That’s of course something wonderful that you can do as a writer of historical fiction as opposed to straight history. In my own work, Young Rembrandt , I tried to write like a novelist while sticking to the facts, but Margriet de Moor goes further than that, writing about circumstances that led to the creation of two drawings by Rembrandt of the Danish girl Elsje Christiaens. “Reading this book was like walking into the mind of Rembrandt” This is the girl of the title, who came to Amsterdam to seek fortune, and after many trials murdered her landlady. As punishment, she was executed by the authorities of the day—strangled and put up on a gallows pole. Somehow, Rembrandt felt compelled to travel to the site of the execution and depict this unfortunate girl, crossing the water in a little boat and then making two very touching drawings of her. De Moor also imagines the scene from her perspective, whose history she writes. Who was she? What made her tick? What went through her mind when she took the life of her landlady, and what was she thinking in her final moments? As a matter of historic record, we know only a few facts of Elsje Christiaens’ short life. Nobody knows however what her motivations were, why exactly she came over to Amsterdam from her home town, or what compelled her to kill her landlady with an axe. Thanks to de Moor’s words, we can imagine what it was like to live at the time, and what may have driven the characters in this historic episode, and that’s wonderful. What’s true of Elsje’s imagined life is also true of Rembrandt’s. The painter here is a richly imagined personality. De Moor edges into the mind of Rembrandt and writes about what he might have seen and felt. He was proud, stubborn, strong. But de Moor has not made a caricature of him; she’s really convincing psychologically. The way she depicts Rembrandt is actually quite subtle and delicate. It’s a very moving book. Her style is beautiful. She writes with a real sense of rhythm and without sentimentality. Margriet de Moor was originally a musician. You can tell from the rhythm of her sentences. It’s like listening to music, this book, she writes so beautifully. It’s a curious episode in history, and it takes a leap of imagination to ask why Rembrandt, who was not necessarily the most intrepid of people, would leave his home to have himself ferried over the river to witness this macabre scene. What was it that compelled him to do this? It’s a real feat of imagination to put yourself in another’s shoes in that way."