Why a Booktrail?
1600s – Visiting Rembrandt’s House is a memorable experience and his home is captured brilliantly in this novel. Get a glimpse of this famous painter by looking beyond his paintings.
Rembrandt’s Whore
What you need to know before your trail
Hendrickje Stoffels was Rembrandt’s mistress, with whom he spent the last twenty years of his life. This novel tells her story through her fictional but totally believable point of view!
When Hendrickje escapes the harsh realities of her garrison hometown to become a servant in Rembrandt’s household, she soon becomes his lover and closest confidante, but is soon fated to discover the hypocrisy and fickleness of Amsterdam society, which ostracizes her and precipitates Rembrandt’s final collapse.
Travel Guide
If we could imagine the life that Rembrandt spent with Hedrickje Stoffels, his common law wife, then this is the novel that takes you back, sets you down in the centre of their home and gives you a unique vantage point from which to observe the goings on of the life of a very interesting couple indeed.
Hedrickje Stoffels arrived at Rembrandt’s house in 1649 when she came to work as his maid and stayed until her death in 1663 when she died of the plague. Makes you think about how women were thought of and treated and is a fascinating story of a famous painter and artist. See his paintings and his house for a real evocative visit to the city.
“I look at this man’s face next to mine, already lined and puffy from life and life’s sorrows, I look at this eyes, his kindness. I know this is where my life is.”
Written in the first person, it reads rather like a diary or thought process of the mistress and her love for the man himself rather than a novel as such. However there is a brilliant sense of time, place and daily life which gives a keen insight into how people thought and went about things during that time. This was also set during the plague years and we see people’s reactions to that scourge on society.
Richly descriptive and an insight in to Rembrandt’s mindset, way of life and his developing genius.
“Rembrandt is working. He doesn’t eat at midday.”
A fascinating account of one of the most iconic painters of all time.
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