Rembrandt: The Epic Novel (Illustrated) © Copyright, 2019 by Devault Graves Books, Memphis, Tennessee. Originally published as Rembrandt in 1961 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without the permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-94253-136-4
Cover design: Martina Voriskova
Table of Contents
FOREWORD by Tom Graves
BOOK I 1623
BOOK II 1623-1624
BOOK III 1630-1631
BOOK IV 1632-1633
BOOK V 1634-1637
BOOK VI 1640-1642
BOOK VII 1642-1645
BOOK VIII 1648-1654
BOOK IX 1655-1659
BOOK X 1660-1662
BOOK XI 1666-1669
Foreword
by Tom Graves
I happened upon the epic novel Rembrandt by a master of historical fiction, Gladys Schmitt, in a compendium of book reviews for the year 1961. I was in the library of the college where, until my retirement, I taught English, Literature, and Humanities, flipping through the various reference sources for books published in the mid-20th century. I was seeking titles for the publishing company I founded in 2012 with my then partner Darrin Devault. Our goal with Devault Graves Books was to find obscure books that were out-of-print and bring them back into the age of digital books. Our motto was and remains “no good book deserves to fall into obscurity.”
The review excerpt I found for Rembrandt gave the book, and its author Gladys Schmitt, high praise, recommending not only her fine, florid prose, but her deep scholarship and a knowledge of her subject that seemed almost personal and first-hand and not the result of years of study of rare books, many of them in Dutch, in dust-filled rooms. One reason the book caught my attention was because I was enamored of Rembrandt’s work as a young teenager, writing a report based on a student-level book I found in my school library. I vaguely remembered that Rembrandt was supposed to have had a mercurial temperament and that he up-ended the staid trademarks of Dutch painting with revolutionary ideas of both subject matter and technique.
It was seeing a Rembrandt self-portrait in-the-flesh so to speak that his genius came home to me. I was in New York City with my wife, who was an art major, and a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was at the top of our list of places to visit. To someone from the provinces—Memphis, Tennessee in our case—little prepares you for the visual feast that awaits you at this world-renowned museum. Turn a corner and George Washington crossing the Delaware, a painting seen since childhood, hits you in the face in a size nearly the width of a typical Memphis home. There is so much to see that it floods the senses and taxes long-term memories. But one memory clearly stands out.
The only painting in the entire museum that had a velvet rope in front of it to keep crowds at bay was a self-portrait of Rembrandt that was, according to the placard, on loan from another museum. It was the only painting encountered that day that had a crowd swelling around it. I had never seen an actual Rembrandt before and I pushed my way to the edge of the velvet rope to see the painting up close. In the painting Rembrandt wore a fine sash across his chest that was embroidered on its edges in gold finery. Up close the gold embroidery looked very strange—it seemed as if the gold paint had been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube, which of course did not exist in the 1600s. Rembrandt glopped the paint on; in places it must have been a half-inch thick, and no rendering of this painting in a book or on a slide or PowerPoint projection could possibly give a true representation of the actual work.
When I walked away from the painting and was about 15 feet from it I turned around to see it from a bit of distance. The painting was utterly transformed! The sash with its beautiful gold embroidery came to life and was so real that I could only stand there and gape. Rembrandt’s mastery of technique was at such a stratospheric level that even the Italian masters must be bowing from the heavens.
And so I found some out-of-print copies of Gladys Schmitt’s Rembrandt and sent off for them. What wound up on my doorstep was two doorstops. The book was 650 pages of very tiny print; once digitized into Microsoft Word I knew it would easily top 1,000 pages in double-spaced font. Most of the Devault Graves books are about one-third that size. Once a book is digitized so that it can be turned into an ebook, for example, the process leaves hundreds of errors that must be corrected through tedious and careful proofreading. My original partner, Darrin Devault, was not up for such a tiresome and arduous task and who could blame him? But the book was never far from my desk or from my mind.
So, I decided to read at least a few chapters to see if I had the heart to tackle the project by myself. Within the first few pages Gladys Schmitt had me hooked. She begins the book with Rembrandt at 17 years old, studying with a master painter, Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg, in his hometown of Leyden, and already feeling he was destined for greatness. Rembrandt believed he already had conquered the techniques necessary for his artistic goals and wanted to be set free to explore his ideas on his own. He was adamant, however, that he didn’t want to waste time and talent by apprenticing further in Italy, the home of the Great Ones. He wanted to tread where no man had gone before him, not retrace the steps of others no matter how great.
In America today almost anyone can hang a shingle and call himself or herself an artist. Too many do, truth be told. Very, very few have mastered the techniques taught by their betters as was required in earlier centuries in Europe. An apprenticeship of, typically, three or four years with a certified “master” was necessary for any talented young man (few women were admitted to this exclusive club) to call himself an “artist.” Having served an apprenticeship, the more talented among those schooled would have been introduced to wealthy and connected patrons where commissions would be expected to play out for the duration of the artist’s life.
The Rembrandt we meet in this book is not particularly concerned with wealth or fame, but he does demand recognition. The Rembrandt as Gladys Schmitt portrays him is just as mercurial as I remembered him from my middle school days, whose seriousness about his art practically knows no bounds. Although social, he has little time for anything that distracts him from his calling. His genius is discovered early on, and his champions devote themselves to him for a lifetime and are, in fact, his lifeline. His commission to draw an anatomy lesson from his friend and patron, the physician Dr. Tulp, brings him to the attention of all Amsterdam and the Dutch royal family. He gets rich, marries well and into prominence, and thinks his life is made when he gets a commission to paint a highly lucrative portrait of a military regiment captained by one of his best friends.
Rembrandt, who often finds words inadequate to explain his thoughts and visions, instead of painting a standard-issue standing-in-formation portrait paints an in-motion tableau where some of the regiment are in shadow, some are covered by objects, and only a few of the men are shown clearly and as a whole. To further infuriate those men who paid tidy sums for this group portrait a young girl painted with a heavenly glow around her runs among the men. Who is this girl? Why is she even in the painting at all? It makes no sense.
What they did not know was that Rembrandt’s wife, his beloved Saskia, was dying. Rembrandt added a childhood version of his true love, bringing her to life in his painting as her life ebbed beyond the easel. Although many recognized the genius and innovation of The Night Watch as the painting would come to be known, it was rejected by Amsterdam society. Rembrandt’s star fell and his extravagant spending and purchase of one of Amsterdam’s stateliest houses eventually brought him to bankruptcy.
His one child, his son Titus, takes over Rembrandt’s business affairs and restores him to solvency. Slowly and with certain pains his reputation, in tatters, is restored. Even as he becomes old and infirm he continues to paint, and as he always has he obsesses over his work. He remains mercurial to the bitter end.
Gladys Schmitt was born in 1909 in Pittsburgh and graduated from the university there. She spent nearly a decade as an editor at Scholastic Magazine. For the next thirty years she was a professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon. In fact, she founded the Creative Writing department there and was instrumental in getting Creative Writing recognized as an integral component of English programs in not only the U.S. but in Europe as well. Not content with just her teaching duties, she began to write and publish deeply-researched historical novels that bloomed with a fine prose style that borrowed from the elegant turns of phrase of the great 19th century stylists. Her writing was always a pleasure to read, immersed the reader into the depths of her characterizations, and presented an array of factual information at the very least as detailed and gratifying as the best biographers.
Her novel David the King, published by Dial in 1946, her second novel, was a smash hit, a Number One bestseller that sold over a million copies, putting her into a very elite category of writers. She would go on to write a dozen books, Rembrandt being another that at the time of its publication climbed the charts and sold in great numbers. She wrote plays, poems, her great historical novels, and other literary forms, always at the very highest levels of those arts. She died in 1972 and although she would never be forgotten at Carnegie Mellon and in the literature enclaves of Pittsburgh where she was renowned for her literary salons, her books would go out-of-print and her name would become a footnote.
Why? She lived during the time of the celebrity author—Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, Vidal, Capote, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, et al.—when to be remembered one had to have an outsized personality (or persona) that could be marketed and branded. Many writers preferred to just write excellent books, fame be damned. Even though some of Gladys Schmitt’s novels reached the highest heights of sales, crowding bookstore shelves, with readers eager to sink into easy chairs to plunge into her books, she never developed the media starpower needed to remain in the public consciousness.
But her books endure. They are still there if one seeks them out and upon reading them they do not disappoint. Rembrandt deserved being brought back from the world of forgotten and neglected books and Devault Graves Books is proud to offer this epic novel to the public again in ebook form at reasonable cost. It is perfectly suited to your Kindle or other reading device. Several Rembrandt paintings were added to the text to help illustrate the story. These paintings were not included in the 1961 Random House edition but were added by Devault Graves Books.
When I was asked about Rembrandt by a friend who knew I was working with the text, I told him that reading the book made me think of Stanley Kubrick’s masterful film, Barry Lyndon. Like Barry Lyndon, Rembrandt is beautiful. Schmitt’s writing style uses language as Rembrandt used his brush. The prose is lilting and musical and elevates the story without pretense or preciousness. If you read this book you will know Rembrandt, at least the fictional Rembrandt Schmitt wants you to know. How accurate is this Rembrandt? I think it would take a Rembrandt expert—which I am not—to weigh in on that subject. But after reading the book I not only feel I know Rembrandt, but I feel like I know precisely how he felt. His hurts, his longings, his obsessions, his worries, his loves.
There were times when reading the book I literally shouted with joy when Rembrandt had a particularly good turn of events. Tears welled in my eyes when Rembrandt’s heart was heavy with grief as he lost those he most loved.
Kubrick’s film is perfectly composed. So is Rembrandt. The film puts you into a long-ago time where you feel you are right there. So does Rembrandt.
The film is rather long. Rembrandt is rather longer.
When I finished I wanted to read the book all over again. Some day I shall.
—Tom Graves
Memphis, Tennessee, 2019
Tom Graves is the owner of Devault Graves Books and is the author of the award-winning Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson and the memoir White Boy among other books.
BOOK I
1623
When the miller Harmen Gerritszoon added “van Rijn” to his name, it was not to make himself sound like a person of consequence. He began to use the name of the river because there were so many Harmens and Gerrits, and with new mills springing up in the windy city of Leyden, it became advisable for him to indicate on his sacks that brewers who wanted more of his finely ground malt could depend on getting it from that particular Harmen, son of Gerrit, whose mill was on the bank of the Rhine.
His life had held little promise to begin with. While his mother was still carrying him, it had looked as if anybody who survived the Spanish occupying army would be wiped out by that other implacable enemy, the sea. Like most of the Leydeners, his people were Protestants— psalm-singers, image-breakers, hot partisans of the Prince of Orange—and had lived for months under the general death sentence passed by the Spanish on all their kind. That sentence could be carried out without further accusation or any pretense of a public trial: when they went about what mean business was left to them in the paralyzed city, it was not unusual for them to find the butcher or the baker dangling by a rope in the doorway of his shop or leaning half-charred against a stake in the square. God, pure and simple, was all they had left to rely on; and it was strange that they did not consider themselves God-forsaken when the great storms gathered the ocean into one solid, oily, yellow-brown line of crests and sent it crashing against the dykes from the Flemish coast to the Zuyder Zee. To the sixteen thousand Protestant martyrs and the ten thousand slaughtered in futile battles with the Spaniards, another hundred thousand were added, swallowed up with their houses and cattle and everything but their weather vanes and steeples in the great December flood.
No, he had not lain peaceful in the womb, or known much comfort in his cradle. During his infancy, helpless endurance had been replaced by what had seemed insane defiance; and city after city, slamming its gates against the tyrant, had paid for its foolhardy insolence in rape and murder and fire—everything but the indestructible towers of the Middle Ages turned to cinders and leveled with the depopulated streets. There were times when communication was cut off between town and town, and guesses and rumors intensified the conviction of universal calamity. Trying to reap the remains of his trampled crop on a hillside, a farmer saw the walls of a city below him suddenly filled like a great brazier with leaping flames; looking up from his forbidden Bible on a Sabbath afternoon, a burgher heard a great lamentation carried in on the wind from a neighboring town where thousands were being put to the sword. That Harmen Gerritszoon or any other man should have come alive and whole out of those times was a proof of God’s kindness to His little ones; otherwise they would certainly have perished or been warped into Devil’s children, taking in fear as they did with every breath and choking on the curdle of fear in their mother’s milk.
He was only four years old when the Spanish had come to besiege his own city; and he could never be sure, when he looked back on that protracted agony, what he could take for a real memory and what had come alive for him because he had heard it recounted a hundred times as reason for thanksgiving at a full table. Had he really stood on the walls and seen the country between the battlements and the yellowish water swarming with the ranks of the black-beards, settled as thick as horseflies on a piece of summer meat? Had he heard them shout up that not a sparrow could get in or out of the city now, or had somebody told it to him afterwards, aping their crazy Dutch? He was sure he could remember the taste of the malt-cake that everybody had eaten after the last of the bread was gone: teeth covered with a sticky coating and tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth were sensations a man was not likely to make up. He probably could not actually recall the rats, the cats, the dogs, the flesh of sick horses, for his mother told them she had never named the meat and had done whatever she could to obliterate the nature of the creature before she put it on the plate. Nettles, plantain, timothy grass, leaves and bark of trees, boiled leather—these too he had eaten, folding his hands over the board while his father, without irony, had invited the Lord to be a guest at the meal and had finished off the grace with a prayer for the coming of the navy of the Prince of Orange, which was rumored to lie just out of sight beyond the wild stretch of dunes outside the westward wall.
Six months that siege had lasted, and he remembered it mostly as a great, tired silence; the recollection came upon him like a sickness whenever he read in Ecclesiastes, “And the mourners go about the streets.” Pestilence had come to work hand in hand with starvation, and no man rose from his bed without asking himself which of those he loved had died in the night. There was not even any weeping—nobody had the strength for weeping—and every utterance, from “God rest his soul” to “Go pick up your toys” came out on a sigh. One thing he was sure he could remember: his mother and he and some of the neighbor women and their children—so cadaverously like what hung on the Spanish gibbets that it seemed strange they should be moving about— went to the cemetery, the only place left as yet unstripped, to eat the grass and ivy from the graves. As they ate, they had kept up a strange, psalmlike murmur, half speech, half chanting; and his persistent curiosity to know what they had been saying had driven him to ask his mother about it in later, better days. “Ah, do you remember that?” she said. “We asked them to forgive us for taking what was theirs. We kept it untouched for a long time, that graveyard, and then we could not leave it anymore; we had to give the green things to the children. We were begging their forgiveness for robbing their graves.”
The dead had had a watery sleep of it in the weeks before the deliverance. The little navy of the Prince of Orange was the sole remaining hope of Leyden, since the army and the Prince’s brother Louis had been slaughtered in the mud at the battle of Mookerheyde. There was only one way to bring the fleet up to the battlements: they sallied out by night and smashed their dykes, so that the sea came in upon the land and the ships were borne in over the dunes and villages on the encroaching flood. Those ships had come over drowned crops and farmsteads, past balconies and steeples and floating houses—but they had come. And what had ruined the land had also devoured the invader; for months after the inundation the receding waters had yielded up the corpses of the Spanish veterans—hundreds had been caught before they could make good their flight.
With such a beginning, who would be foolish enough to hanker after more than the good God had provided? That the Spaniard should have marched away, that the sea should have seeped back into its appointed place, that the drowned meadows and villages should have had their resurrection was enough and more than enough. Harmen Gerritszoon considered himself blessed in the possession of a fine mill, a good house, and a kitchen garden flourishing in what had once been waterlogged country outside the city walls. Adding “van Rijn” to his name was only a prudent measure taken for the sake of his customers; to pretend that he had gotten himself knighted by some Papist king in a foreign court was alien to his nature and his history. His cup ran over, goodness and mercy had followed him, and he would have considered it a sacrilege to ask for anything beyond the bounty in his hands.
Not that he saw the world as uniformly benign, washed in the tepid gleam of an easy piety. Nobody could know the fullness of the light without having looked into the shadow; and there were shadows in his own family that neither he nor his wife tried to hide from themselves. Gerrit, the eldest and the handsomest of the children who had stayed with him, was an almost helpless cripple; both his shins had been shattered when he swerved under the weight of a sack of barley and toppled over the side of the stairs. And Gerrit was not one of those whose spirits sweeten with affliction: his face, startlingly out of keeping with the soft and sunny curls around it, was greyed and hollowed, and his lips were as wry as if he had a perpetual bad taste in his mouth. Adriaen was healthy and well-married and solidly set up as a shoemaker in a decent shop; but because his ailing elder brother had been given much by necessity, and his gifted younger brother Rembrandt even more by the parents’ choice, he felt himself cheated. Every now and again he let it be known that if he had been enrolled at the university he would never have abandoned it to waste time on crayons and paint-pots; he would have stayed there until he was ready to do something worthwhile, like preach the word of God.
As for the only girl—it was a hard business for a man to judge his daughter. Lysbeth was blond and buxom, with a white skin brightened by the pink spots on her cheeks and her round little chin, and there would have been nothing to keep her from being as sought-after as any girl in the neighborhood if only she had learned to hold her tongue. But scarcely an evening went by with company in the house when she did not make a spectacle of herself. She delivered impassioned speeches whose intent she never knew until she was half-finished; the less familiar she was with a subject, the more she had to say about it; the more distinctly she saw herself put in the wrong, the more she insisted that she was right, right, right, staring at her bewildered opponent with injured, china-blue eyes. So much ardor might have been overlooked in a girl in her teens if there had not been an indefinable falseness about it all: when she was at her hottest, with her face flushed and her ribbons jerking, he felt—and knew that others felt it too—an underlayer of almost repellent cold. Lads still walked with her on the battlements or the dunes, but none of them ever turned up more than five or six times, and there were long and empty waits between them. She was a good girl, his Lysbeth, and it was a pity to see her playfellows all being married around her—such a pity that cousins and friends of the family had taken to buying her gifts by way of consolation. But these, too, she turned into a cause for embarrassment: every scarf, every brooch, every pair of velvet roses for her shoes she accepted as if it were the sign of some special devotion. Which was particularly unfortunate, since Jan Lievens, Rembrandt’s former friend back home on a visit from Amsterdam, had brought her a little red Gospel with metal clasps, and big and good-looking as the Lievens boy was—though a little soft for Harmen Gerritszoon’s taste—she was bound to get ideas into her head.
Rembrandt and the Lievens boy … It was their absence that had brought on the stillness in the springtime house, the tendency to brood on solemn things, the restlessness that kept taking him into the garden to look at the hyacinth and tulip sprouts. They had gone to the mill to carry some sacks up to the drying-floor, and he was not sorry to miss two or three hours of the young Amsterdammer’s company: his high-sounding pronouncements and grandiose gestures, impressive at first, seemed affected after a couple of days. But Rembrandt he missed; on the rare occasions when he spent an afternoon in the house, he liked to have Rembrandt sitting at the table with paper or a square of copper, sketching, pondering, holding one of those conversations in which a sentence, suspended to make way for a series of strokes with the crayon or the etching needle, would be finished after a long pause, the coarse mane of reddish hair lifted into sunlight, the blunt face suddenly kindled by the eyes, the eyes themselves—vague with speculation a moment before—sharp and aware, shedding a cool grey light.
And now he thought of the painting on the easel in the attic: with the help of an old purple cloak bought from a ragpicker, Rembrandt was doing his brother Gerrit as Saint Bartholomew. For the first time, with that picture to look at, he had been thinking that his youngest might well recompense the family for what they had sacrificed, might even wipe out the memory of his fruitless session at the university or at least turn it into a kind of joke. On that piece of canvas for which, according to Adriaen, a preposterous price had been paid, Gerrit had actually become Saint Bartholomew, the rainy-day aches in his shattered shins changed into foreshadowings of the pains of martyrdom. Thinking of the pale purplish mantle, deep-piled and rubbed in places like actual velvet, thinking of the moisture of pain on the wan forehead, so real that it invited touch, he could imagine his son in a studio of his own on a good Leyden street; he could even see him as respected as his master, the excellent van Swanenburgh, doing portraits of the Regents of the orphanage and commissioned by the Burgomaster to paint some big historical canvas to be hung in the City Hall.
The house was quiet. The late afternoon sun, weak behind a veil of cloud, lay over the empty and orderly back room. Gerrit was in bed with a book, his wife was at the spit in the kitchen, and Lysbeth had gone to the center of town, where he had sent her to invite Heer van Swanenburgh to do them and their guest the honor of dropping in this evening for a little conversation and a mug of beer. It had been a daring thing to issue such an invitation. The master had come twice before to the van Rijn house, as courtesy required, to let them know that he had accepted Rembrandt as his apprentice and to acknowledge with thanks his receipt of the first installment of the fee, and on both those occasions he had shown them all a warm and easy cordiality. But he belonged to the old aristocracy and was worlds above them, and only the fact that young Lievens had once worked in his studio had given Harmen Gerritszoon courage to ask him to the house as though he had been a cousin or a fellow-tradesman or a family friend.
Yes, and the picture had emboldened him too. This morning, while he stood in front of the easel, it had occurred to him that Heer van Swanenburgh, even though his studio drew the best of the Leyden student artists, must have had few apprentices who could do as well and that he might be willing to extend something more than the traditional courtesies for such a promising pupil’s sake. But now, since it was growing late and he was sure that Lysbeth would have hurried home if the news had been good, he felt impelled to go up to the loft and have another look for reassurance: were they as real as he remembered them—the crushed places on the old velvet cloak and the sweat standing out on the wan brow?
❖ ❖ ❖
Lysbeth Harmensdochter prided herself on her good sense, a quality which her friends remarked on with increasing frequency. She knew that her father would be anxious about the result of her walk to town and that her mother should be told as soon as possible that not only the master but also his Italian wife—a real honor because Vrouw van Swanenburgh called only on the richest burghers—would pay them a visit tonight. There was herring to chop, beer to cool in a bucket of water, bread to bring from the baker’s, a fire to lay in the front room; and the mistress of the house would have to move fast, since the afternoon was almost gone. Her vaunted good sense carried her in a hurry as far as the Pelican Quay, from which she could see the mill, but there it was suddenly lost because it occurred to her that her brother and his visitor might still be inside. Finding all at once that good sense was a barren source of satisfaction, she turned onto the muddy path still marked by the hoofs of the horses that had brought the barley in, and once she was inside, in the warm and familiar shadow with the smell of fermenting grain around her, her sense of urgency was completely gone.
The fact that the boys were nowhere on the ground floor did not discourage her: it was no place to lie on your back and carry on high talk about fame and art—the rats came back almost as quickly as the rat-catcher carried them away. As she crossed to the steep stairs that had been poor Gerrit’s undoing, she could feel the boys’ presence somewhere in the sun-drenched shadow, and it was hard to suppress the desire to call out the beloved name. “Jan,” she said in a whisper, breathing it into the rich-smelling duskiness with yearning and passion, as the poets said. But the last few years had taught her that matters seldom turned out well if she began them in so high a key; and just before she reached the place on the steps where her head would become visible, she stopped and composed herself, wiping the shine from her nose and flicking out the damp curls that came forward over her brow.
“We almost never draw from casts in Lastman’s studio. We almost always work from models,” said the deep and impressive voice of the guest from Amsterdam.
“Really?” said Rembrandt. “Women, too?”
“We have women in whenever there’s need of them. There are plenty in the city who make their living that way.”
“Young women? Pretty women?”
“Oh, now you’re asking for too much, my friend. No, they’re a flabby lot, really—the master says they’re held in shape only by the grace of God and their stays. You should see the one we had last month—she had a belly as big as a keg, and—”
Lysbeth coughed out of discretion and went up two more steps into their sight, looking not at them but beyond them at the malt-mash, flattened out like an enormous pancake on the drying-floor. She was glad that her own belly scarcely curved the gathers in her skirt of flowered cloth.
“Oh, Lysbeth,” said young Lievens, jumping up from the grain-strewn planks with cosmopolitan courtliness.
“What are you doing here, Puss? Are we wanted?” said Rembrandt, scarcely bothering to lift his head from the pile of empty sacks it rested on.
Why must he use the foolish pet name in Jan’s presence? It relegated her to the place of a troublesome little sister, and she was eighteen, a good year older than he. “No,” she said, looking with disapproval at his prone and impervious person. “I was just coming back from a walk, and I thought—”
The visitor made it unnecessary for her to finish by waving her to a seat of honor made of two full sacks laid one upon the other, and let himself down a little below her on the drying-floor. Rembrandt stayed on his back, still playing the surly brother, his head at her feet, his trunk, sturdy and muscular, going out at an angle, his feet in their dusty black shoes almost touching the curled edge of the malt-mash. “Of course, casts aren’t exactly to be sneered at,” he said, as if she had never made her appearance. “I’ve learned a thing or two from casts, and from the look of that charcoal male nude you showed me yesterday, so have you.”
“That wasn’t drawn from a cast, my lad. That was from the statue itself; Lastman owns it. There’s all the difference on earth between marble and a dead-white plaster cast. The marble looks alive—it’s yellowish, you know, and I imagine it’s gotten more so from lying in the ground all those centuries.”
Rembrandt sat up and clasped his knees with his hands; they were blunt and knotted even though he had done little rough work, and the knobby wrists were covered with reddish hair. “It’s a fine statue, no doubt about it. At least I can copy your charcoal—that is, if I may,” he said, fixing his imperious grey look on his companion’s face.
“Certainly. Anything I brought back is at your service. But it’s a pity you should be copying other people’s drawings, with your talent. It’s time you were working from the originals.”
The charged stillness that came over the two of them made her wonder whether they had been discussing matters they meant to keep hidden from her. The air was so quiet that the great sails of the windmill were not moving in the least, and the beams of light slanting to the drying-floor were undisturbed except by gilded motes of dust.
“Oh, I work from originals,” Rembrandt said at last. “It isn’t as if van Swanenburgh didn’t have his own authentic things.”
Here, she thought, was the time to tell them about the master’s forthcoming visit. She opened her mouth and assumed an air of happy anticipation, but Lievens broke in before she could speak. “Yes, I remember,” he said with a disparaging smile. “That Medusa head of his for instance—does he still have you draw it twenty different ways? In the couple of years I was with him I got to know every twist in every snake by heart.”
“It’s months since we’ve used that Medusa. You wouldn’t have seen the fine old Florentine medallions we’re working on now; he got those after you were gone.”
“Any antiquities?”
“No, no new antiquities …”
“Well, Lastman owns at least a dozen. He came back from Italy with five or six, and his friends over there keep sending him more. Besides, it isn’t only what’s at Lastman’s—it’s all the things you can get to see. Last Friday I had a day off; and in that one day, between the collections and the auctions, I saw a Michelangelo drawing, a Titian portrait, and a beautiful little nude in oil by Caravaggio. And if you’re talking about medallions, old coins, that sort of thing, the wharf is littered with them. Anybody with a few florins in his pocket can buy his own collection straight off the ships.”
Her brother did not answer, but his cool grey look had kindled, and though he tried to hide it by letting down his eyelids, she knew that he and his visitor had indeed come over to the mill to talk secrets of their own. What secrets? Surely not a wish on Rembrandt’s part to go to Amsterdam, to wound her mother and father by leaving their house, to desert the excellent van Swanenburgh and turn his back on the true-hearted city that had outfaced the Spaniards while the Amsterdammers had kept the peace to save their florins and their skins.
“That’s all very well,” her brother said, “but how much would you have left after you paid the sort of fee that Lastman charges?”
“You talk as if it were a fortune,” said Lievens. “It’s something more than van Swanenburgh gets, I’ll admit—perhaps a third again as much. But adding up everything I’d say that it was reasonable, especially when you consider that you’d be living in the house of a gentleman.”
The house of a gentleman … Certainly, thought Lysbeth, that rich and cultivated house had worked wonders on Jan Lievens. What had gone into it raw had come out polished, with all the farmerish gawkiness gone. Staring into one of the dusty shafts of sunlight, she called up an image of her brother changed in the same fashion. She could see him in the gilded salon of some notable Amsterdam collector, standing against a damask curtain as he sometimes stood against the corner cupboard in the kitchen, his reddish mane thrown back, his blunt chin thrust out, his left hand resting jauntily on his hip. A cloak of scarlet velvet hung casually over the tawny satin of his jacket, and a mysterious moonstone such as the City Advocate’s wife wore around her neck on a ribbon dangled from his ear, spotting the clear, fine skin of his cheek with a cold and bluish fire …
“That kind of living doesn’t concern me,” said Rembrandt almost roughly. “When I’m painting it makes no difference to me whether I drink my beer out of crockery or Venetian glass.”
“There’s more to it than drinking out of fine glasses,” said Lievens, at once lofty and evasive. “It’s something you’d have to be exposed to before you’d understand.”
“What’s the point of talking about it anyway?” He picked up a sprouted grain of barley, stripped off the shoot, flung it from him, and reclasped his knobby hands. “It’s out of the question. We could never afford it, could we, Puss?” He looked at her directly for the first time
since she had come into the loft.
“I don’t know—there are all those repairs Father talks about. And for me, it’s very hard to think of parting—”
“Why talk about parting?” said Lievens. “Give him a year with Lastman, and he’ll be ready to start a studio of his own in Amsterdam. He’ll need a house-mistress then to keep his rooms and entertain his friends and patrons, and where could he find a more charming one than here?” He turned his body toward her and laid his strong white fingers on her knee.
That touch, brief as it was, conjured up a heady fantasy. She and Jan and Rembrandt—oh, she could see it as if she were actually there—sauntered arm in arm beside the shimmering water of the famous Prinsenhof Canal, under the branches of the limes and lindens. Poets, painters, scholars moved in a merry company around them, plumed and beribboned, delivered forever from provincial cares and responsibilities … But what was she thinking about, what was she doing here? “Good heavens, what time do you think it is?” she said.
“Time for supper, Puss, according to my stomach.”
“Five at least,” Jan Lievens said.
“Then I’m terribly late—”
“But why? We never eat before six.”
“I know, but I was supposed to tell Mother that the van Swanenburghs are coming to see us tonight.”
She had brought out the announcement awkwardly enough, and it was followed by an awkward silence. Annoyance tightened the corners of her brother’s mouth, though she could not tell whether it rose from his own distaste for spending the evening with his master or from his realization that Jan Lievens, now that his tie with van Swanenburgh was severed, would find the situation embarrassing.
`“Old Swanenburgh—I haven’t seen him in a good two years,” said Lievens.
“No, I don’t suppose you have,” said Rembrandt. “Whose idea was it to ask him over?”
“Father’s. He sent me over to the square to invite him. He thought you’d be pleased—he thought you’d consider it an honor.” That they should care nothing about what her mother and father had planned to give them pleasure, that neither of them should so much as make a show of appreciation was too painful. “Both of them are coming—his lady, too,” she said in an inappropriately boastful voice, knowing that her face was flushed and that tears were standing most unbecomingly in her eyes.
“Oh, it’s an honor; it’s certainly an honor. I’ll be delighted to see them both,” said Lievens, mustering up an unconvincing smile.
Her brother stared straight before him at one of the reddening slants of sunlight, his face remote and immobile, a faint cloud of trouble obscuring the keenness of his glance. “Well, I must say it was good of Father to think of it,” he said after another uneasy silence—a speech which seemed to her a niggardly response to her father’s warm-hearted attempt to provide a happy evening for the guest.
She got up and shook out her skirt. “I’m going. I’m late already,” she said.
Jan Lievens sprang to his feet and began to brush a few spears of barley from her flowered skirt, first near the hem, then up around the hips. “Oh, we would have a time of it in Amsterdam, we three,” he said, and gave her a nudge at the waist with the back of his hand. “Believe me, you would like it—masquerades at Kermis time and French wine at the taverns and music on the Dam—”
Rembrandt got up and turned on him with a cold look. “Don’t get any ideas into your head,” he said. “I never gave this Amsterdam business a thought until you brought it up this afternoon.”
❖ ❖ ❖
It was not true, of course, that he had never thought before of the Amsterdam business. Jan Lievens had sent him five or six letters from the metropolis, only two of which he had answered, since he considered a pen a tool to draw with, not to waste in the scribbling of platitudes, but every time one of these letters had arrived he had felt the magnetic pull of the place. Naturally he wanted to go to Amsterdam; he took it for granted that there was nobody painting in Leyden or Haarlem or Dordt or Groningen who didn’t, but never before this afternoon had the desire become strong enough to discredit what he now possessed. The realization of this change was gnawing at him now, making his supper hard in his stomach while he dressed for the visit of his master; and though Lievens and he were sharing the same copper basin and taking turns at the same little mirror, he did not speak and had made it plain that he did not want to be spoken to. The top of the dresser was too small, the easel was in his way, the sloping walls of the room confined him. Leyden, which had always looked to him like an excellent second choice, had become a limitation, an imposition, a frustration scarcely to be borne.
Lievens was at the mirror, spitting on the tips of his fingers and pasting down his eyebrows—a habit at once soft and vulgar. God moved in a mysterious way, not always distributing His favors to the deserving: some went to Amsterdam to learn to paint and some went to Amsterdam to be patted and prodded into a kind of whitish cheese. If he were to live in the metropolis and consort with his peers, if he could work under a master as famous as Lastman … But that was a dream, that was impossible, and it put him in no better humor with his recalcitrant starched collar to know that he was the one who had made it an impossibility. His rightful portion of the family savings—his proper slice of the loaf, as big as that allotted to Gerrit or Adriaen or Lysbeth—he had simply thrown away in that unfortunate venture at the university. That his mother and father, by hoarding and scrimping, should have found him a second piece, that they should have sent him to van Swanenburgh after he had done nothing for a year but sketch scholars in the library and tropical vines and crocodiles in the botanical gardens was already an indulgence; and he could imagine the storm that would break on his head if he came begging for still another year.
“My sash won’t lie down properly. Would you have a pin?” said Lievens in a diffident voice.
“Over there, in that box on the chest. Though why you need it, I don’t know. Your sash looks flat enough to me.”
“This satin is so bulky.”
“Then why wear a satin sash?”
“Why wear a sash at all?” said Lievens, aggrieved.
“That’s right. Why wear a sash at all?”
Now that he had said it he would have to abandon his intention of wearing the pale blue woolen sash his mother had given him last year for his seventeenth birthday. That was unfortunate, since she would probably conclude that he did not think it fine enough to wear in front of van Swanenburgh, who in her eyes and his father’s was a great painter and a true aristocrat. He could not reasonably be angry because they had invited the master and his bizarre woman to the house: they could not be expected to understand how much it would embarrass Lievens now that he had put the provincial studio behind him; they could not guess how little he himself—seeing the master’s limitations as sharply as he did tonight—would want to spend an evening playing the role of devoted and respectful pupil. Yet when sounds came up from the kitchen, reminding him that they were hurrying about to prepare for an occasion they would remember for months, the thought of their excitement was so irritating to him that he had to bury it under a surge of exasperation with Lievens, who was still monopolizing the mirror to make a minute inspection of the part in his hair.
It was useless for him to try to get a look at himself over his visitor’s shoulder. For a few moments he looked at the Saint Bartholomew on the easel—there was a spot on the cloak that he had meant to fix before Jan Lievens’ coming, something that he had been itching to get at these last three days. Then he crossed the room and stopped a couple of feet away from the window, where his reflection made its appearance—cut up and warped and rippled—on the blackness of the night beyond the leaded glass … black jacket, white shirt, dignified simplicity perfectly suitable for an evening at home, though he wished his nose had been less broad and blunt at the tip.
“What are you doing?” said Lievens.
“Looking out of the window.” It was an obvious piece of rudeness. Night had blotted out everything, even the wan ribbon of canal water that had held the light until half an hour ago.
“You’re welcome to the mirror if you want it.”
“No, thanks. I’m finished.”
“I’ll be ready myself in five more minutes. Though why I should be taking so much trouble to get myself in shape for poor old Swanenburgh, I don’t know.”
He did not answer, only frowned into the darkness. If he could not subscribe to his family’s uncritical veneration of the master, neither could he accept so condescending a reference to the most notable painter in Leyden, whose father had been a burgomaster, whose household was famous for its hospitality and its open-handed charities, and whose family was one of the few representatives of the ancient aristocracy to have survived the Spanish holocaust. If Amsterdam had taught his guest good manners, it had failed to supply him with the most rudimentary grasp of other people’s feelings: “poor old Swanenburgh” was a term that might have been excusable in his own mouth, though he hoped he hadn’t used it at the mill this afternoon, but Lievens should have said “the master” or at the very least “your master.” Well, there was no account to be taken of Lievens. He could draw a beautiful flowing line, and he had come back with some remarkable ideas about color and the massing of figures, but sooner or later it would show up in his painting—the fact that he was an incorrigible fool.
“Really, this sash is impossible. I think I’ll have to undo it and start all over.”
“Take your time,” he said, turning his back on the flawed image in the window. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go on down to the kitchen. I ought to take a look at what my mother’s getting ready for the guests.”
The orderly kitchen and those who were in it—his mother and his brother Adriaen, who had stopped in for a short visit—were visible only in the redness of the supper fire: it would be a pity to have the house reek of oil lamps with company coming, and candles were costly, not to be lighted until the final embers had died. But he always loved this shadowiness and what it did to familiar things, and he paused on the threshold, sensing the quiet that comes when hurried tasks are finished a little early, and drinking in a long breath of peace. His mother, standing with her back to the hearth with only an edging of light around her slight figure, looked venerable enough to be painted as the prophetess Hannah, her wise and wrinkled face half lost in the incense-laden air of the Temple at Jerusalem. His brother Adriaen sat at the table with his stern profile jutting into the dark; his eye, keen and half-lidded like an eagle’s, was a moist spot of brightness under his shaggy brow. On the board were the prepared dishes: chopped herring salad, sliced bread covered with a napkin, and a large bowl of pears preserved in cinnamon.
“This is beautiful, Mother!” he said, dissatisfied with his voice, which did not seem earnest or loving enough to break the serene silence. “It was good of you to take so much trouble.” And her voice, low and quavering for her years, said out of the shadow, “No trouble, dear. No trouble at all.”
And suddenly he did not trust his own voice to answer. That he should have been thinking of leaving this house, this table worn by the thousands of meals they had eaten together, these known, loved faces—it made him want to throw his arms around his mother, to take her hand and hold it against a spot of aching emptiness that had opened in his chest.
“I tasted the salad, and it’s unusually good,” said Adriaen. “If there’s any left, I wish you’d put it by for me. I’ll be stopping in again tomorrow around noon.”
“Why? Aren’t you staying?” he asked. “Couldn’t you go and get Antje? We’d like to have both of you sit down with us.”
“No, I thought I’d go over to the Guild House. There’s a meeting tonight.”