I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (26 page)

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank good friends/excellent writers Barbara Timberlake Russell and Nancy Butts for their suggestions and encouragement during the early stages of writing
I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter
. To my friend and legendary librarian Ruth Berberich, my daughter and judicious critic Lauren Cullen, and my publicity guru and fellow dreamer Brandy Nagel, I also owe many thanks for their readings and wise comments on subsequent revisions. A special thanks goes to Elizabeth Barten for her reading of the manuscript with an eye for things Dutch. I must thank, too, my daughters Alison and Megan for their support for a project that has taken so long to develop it must seem like family to them.

Finally, I’d like to heartily thank my literary agent, Barbara Kouts, for cheering me on from the beginning, Deb Shapiro, for making publicity work fun, and Melanie Cecka, my smart and insightful editor, to whom I will always be grateful for her part in bringing to light a story that is so very close to my heart.

I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter
is a work of fiction, and therefore I have on occasion taken liberties with the historical record when it suited my story. On the whole, though, I tried to stick as closely to the facts as possible, and so good research material was essential. I would therefore like to acknowledge the following authors on whose works I based my tale: Simon Schama (
Rembrandt’s Eyes
, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Gary Schwartz (
Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings
, Viking, 1985); Ernst Van de Wetering (
Rembrandt: The Painter at Work
, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000); and Paul Zumthor (
Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland
, Stanford University Press, 1994).

Author’s Note

I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter
is a fictional story that sprang from my personal interpretations of Rembrandt and his work and my research into Amsterdam in the Golden Age. As I became acquainted with Rembrandt’s world, two paintings particularly intrigued me:
Bathsheba with King David’s Letter—
a painting of his common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels—and his portrait of Nicolaes Bruyningh. I wondered why Hendrickje looked so heartbreakingly regretful in the Bathsheba painting. And who was this charming young man with the wistful smile, this adorable Nicolaes Bruyningh? I was half in love just looking at him.

Hendrickje had come to work for Rembrandt in 1649, while Bruyningh’s portrait was painted in 1652. The two young people would have been in contact … but could there have been more to their story? Only after I knew Rembrandt could I figure out how the lives of Hendrickje, Nicolaes, Rembrandt, and his daughter, Cornelia, might have intersected.

Rembrandt van Rijn was born on July 15, 1606, the eighth of nine children, to a miller and his wife. He must have seemed especially bright to his parents because he was the only of their children they enrolled in higher education. It was soon clear that the fourteen-year-old Rembrandt’s heart was in painting, and he was sent to study first for three years under Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh and then with Pieter Lastman, the most successful painter in Rembrandt’s home-town of Leiden. Within six months Rembrandt was more advanced than his teacher, and he and another talented student, Jan Lievens, set off for the bright lights of Amsterdam to find their fortune.

And find it they did. Within months people in the highest circles in Amsterdam were talking about these two “beardless youths,” and aristocrats lined up at the door of the miller’s son for their portraits. Rembrandt became a master at etching, too, eventually selling prints at the then unheard of price of one hundred guilders each. He did so well that he was able to woo and eventually marry the respectable, modestly wealthy Saskia van Uylenburgh in 1634. Saskia was a cousin of Rembrandt’s art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburgh. To celebrate his newfound wealth and prestige, Rembrandt bought a mansion on the Breestraat, where he set up a workshop that attracted top students like Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, Nicolaes Maes, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Govert Flinck—painters who would go on to have their own illustrious careers.

But Rembrandt quickly found himself chafing under the restrictions of the popular tastes of the time. He experimented with composition in his group portraits and history paintings, arranging figures to tell a dramatic story, instead of just lining people up in an unimaginative way. He played with the effect of lighting, using a technique called
chiaroscuro
, as Cornelia points out in our story. His experimentation in composition and lighting resulted in what is now considered his most famous painting,
The Night Watch
, a wildly dramatic picture of a company of volunteer soldiers.

Modern legend has it that
The Night Watch
outraged Rembrandt’s contemporaries and began his slide into shame and poverty. Though it is true that his style contributed to his financial ruin—he was piling on his paint thickly when the popular fashion was for highly polished work with invisible strokes—it was his controversial personal life that would cause his fall from favor.

While Rembrandt was working on
The Night Watch
, his wife, Saskia, died, leaving him a heartbroken widower with a one-year-old son, Titus. Rembrandt soon had a romantic affair with Titus’s nurse, Geertje Dircx. Although scandalous, the relationship didn’t initially cause his patrons to turn away. Things began to sour when Rembrandt sent a very loudly and publicly protesting Geertje to a women’s jail after she wouldn’t leave him alone. Rembrandt then took up with a young maidservant in the household, Hendrickje Stoffels, further damaging his image. Not only did Rembrandt not hide the fact that he was in love with this daughter of a common army sergeant, he welcomed the daughter she bore him out of wedlock in October 1654—Cornelia.

Hendrickje appeared before church elders to be reprimanded for bearing a child outside of marriage. Meanwhile, Rembrandt’s wealthy friends and patrons, already shocked by his treatment of Geertje Dircx and by his squandering of money, stopped associating with him. Rembrandt ignored them, and they stopped buying his work. It’s not clear why Rembrandt wouldn’t marry Hendrickje; he left no letters or documents recording his thoughts. True, Saskia’s will had stipulated that Rembrandt would lose the money she’d left him if he ever remarried, but Rembrandt always believed he would sell more paintings and wouldn’t need Saskia’s money.

So why didn’t he marry Hendrickje? When looking around for reasons, I lit upon my favorite portrait of Nicolaes Bruyningh, who died a wealthy bachelor in 1680, leaving among his worldly goods Rembrandt’s portrait of him wearing a wistful smile. Why didn’t
he
marry? And what of the mysterious girl called Cornelia, about whom so little is known? This is where my imagination came in. I created Carel Bruyningh, one of the few fictitious characters in the book, to connect Cornelia and Nicolaes—and a story was born.

Though he remained famous his entire life, Rembrandt never did reclaim the popularity of his youth. He went bankrupt and lost the big house on the Breestraat in 1658, and was forced to move to a workingman’s part of town, the Jordaan, directly across the street from an amusement park called the New Maze. This didn’t stop him from creating his best work. The ability of this difficult man to portray the inner workings of the human heart shines in the painting now known as
The Jewish Bride
, the work I have Rembrandt refer to as “Tenderest Love” at the end of
I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter
. Upon seeing this painting in 1885, Vincent van Gogh said, ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ That such a flawed man as Rembrandt could paint such beauty is, to me, truly something to ponder. Genius, evidently, is not reserved for the perfect.

Rembrandt died of unknown causes on October 4, 1669, a year after Titus’s death. He was sixty-three years old. Two weeks after Rembrandt’s death, Titus’s wife, Magdalena van Loo succumbed to the plague. Titus and Magdalena’s eleven-month-old daughter, Titia, was spared, and lived in Amsterdam to the age of forty-six. Due to overcrowding in the van Loo family tomb, Titus’s body was never moved within the church. Like his father, he lies in an unmarked grave in the Westerkerk.

Where did this leave Cornelia? Though not yet sixteen, she wed painter Cornelis Suythof (“Neel”) less than a year after Rembrandt died, in May 1670. She and Cornelis then moved to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, where Cornelis took the position as jail keeper to supplement his income as a painter. Whether or not Cornelia attempted to paint is not known, though I like to think she might have, surrounded as she was by art since her birth. Cornelia and Cornelis’s first child, Rembrandt, was born in 1673. After their second son, Hendric, was born in 1678, Cornelia and her family passed from recorded history. She lives on only here, in the pages of fiction.

Character list from
I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter

Rembrandt van Rijn:
born in Leiden, July 15, 1606; married Saskia van Uylenburgh, June 22, 1634; died October 4, 1669.

Saskia van Uylenburgh:
born August 2, 1612; married Rembrandt van Rijn, June 22, 1634; died June 14, 1642.

Hendrickje Stoffels:
born ca. 1626; common-law wife of Rembrandt van Rijn; died ca. July 24, 1663.

Nicolaes Bruyningh:
born ca. 1630; died 1680. Merchant.

Cornelia van Rijn:
born ca. October 30, 1654, to Hendrickje Stoffels and Rembrandt van Rijn; married painter Cornelis Suythof shortly after May 3, 1670; died Batavia, Dutch East Indies, exact date unknown.

Cornelis Suythof:
born ca. 1646; married Cornelia van Rijn shortly after May 3, 1670; died Batavia, Dutch East Indies, after 1689.

Titus van Rijn:
born ca. September 22, 1641, to Rembrandt van Rijn and Saskia van Uylenburgh; married Magdalena van Loo, February 28, 1668; died ca. September 7, 1668.

Magdalena van Loo:
born ca. May 21, 1642; married Titus van Rijn, February 28, 1668; died ca. October 21, 1669. Related also to Saskia, Hendrick, and Gerrit van Uylenburgh (cousins).

Other children of Rembrandt van Rijn with Saskia:

Rombartus (son):
born ca. December 15, 1635; died ca. February 15, 1636.

Cornelia (daughter):
born ca. July 22, 1638; died ca. August 13, 1638.

Cornelya (daughter):
born ca. July 29, 1640; died ca. August 12, 1640.

Child of Titus van Rijn and Magdalena van Loo:

Titia van Rijn (daughter):
born ca. March 22, 1669; died November 22, 1715.

Children of Cornelia van Rijn and Cornelis Suythof:

Rembrandt:
born ca. December 5, 1673; date of death unknown.

Hendric:
born ca. July 14, 1678; date of death unknown.

Others:

Hendrick van Uylenburgh:
art dealer for Rembrandt van Rijn; cousin to Saskia van Uylenburgh (Rembrandt’s first wife) and father of Gerrit van Uylenburgh.

Gerrit van Uylenburgh:
art dealer, cousin to Saskia van Uylenburgh.

Jan Bruyningh:
brother of Nicolaes Bruyningh; father of Carel Bruyningh; merchant.

Carel Bruyningh (fictitious character):
son of Jan Bruyningh; nephew of Nicolaes Bruyningh; merchant.

Ferdinand Bol:
born ca. 1616, died ca. 1680. Student of Rembrandt van Rijn, later a celebrated painter in his own right.

Govert Flinck:
born ca. 1615; died ca. 1660. Another student of Rembrandt’s who went on to surpass him in popularity in Amsterdam at the time.

Bartholomeus (Bartol) van der Helst:
born ca. 1613; died ca. 1670. Contemporary of Rembrandt—most sought out portraitist in the city during Rembrandt’s latter years.

Notable Rembrandt Paintings

Family Group. Ca. 1666. Canvas, 126 × 167 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

Titus
. Ca. 1658. Canvas, 67.3 × 55.2 cm. Wallace Collection, London.

Peter Denying Christ
. 1660. Canvas, 154.× 169 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Two Moors
. 1661. Canvas, 77.8.× 64.4 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

The Sampling Officials
. 1662. Canvas, 191.5.× 279 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Oath of Claudius Civilis
. Ca. 1661–1662. Canvas, cut down to 1966× 309 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Self-portrait
. Ca. 1661–1662. Canvas, 114.3 × 95.2 cm. Ken-wood House, The Iveagh Bequest, London.

Portrait of Jacob Trip
. Ca. 1661. Canvas, 130.5.× 97 cm. National Gallery, London.

Portrait of Margaretha de Geer
. Ca. 1661. Canvas, 130.5.× 97.5 cm. National Gallery, London.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deyman
. 1656. Canvas, cut down to 100n× 134 cm. Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Amsterdam.

Juno
. Begun about 1661, finished after summer 1665. Canvas, 127.× 107.5 cm. The Armand Hammer Collection, Los Angeles.

The Evangelist Matthew Inspired by an Angel
. 1661. Canvas, 96 × 81 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris.

Saskia as Flora
. Ca. 1634. Canvas, 125 × 101 cm. Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Bathsheba with King David’s Letter
. 1654. Canvas, 142.×142 cm. Louvre, Paris.

Hendrickje at an Open Door
. Ca. 1656. Canvas, 88.5.× 67 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.