Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Even closer to Rembrandt’s first home outside the Uylenburgh academy, just a few steps from his front door, was the Kloveniers-doelen, the meeting hall of one of the city’s civic guard companies. The group portraits of these companies are likewise stock images in all our minds: long-nosed, florid-faced men in floppy black hats and long white collars, hoisting either pikes and muskets or, when they are seated around a banquet table, heavy goblets. For the purposes of this book, what is worth pointing out about the civic guard companies is that they spoke to what had come into being in Dutch cities in the seventeenth century. It was individual townsmen who controlled their city, fostered its trade, and protected its citizens. It is their pride in that fact—and its uniqueness in Europe—that is reflected both in the canvases and in the genre itself.

  But how to make such a staid genre come to life? That was the question before Rembrandt when the kloveniers’ guild (a klover was a kind of musket) asked him to paint them. The circumstances of the commission say a bit more about Amsterdam’s liberal culture. The banquet hall of the kloveniers was a public space, right in the center of town (the building has since been reworked into a hotel). The idea was to cover the walls with group portraits of the various companies, so that anyone who came in could admire not only the individuals whose likenesses were there preserved but the bond they represented between individuals and the community. The paintings were public statements that said in effect: Here we don’t depend on kings or armies or hired guns; this is our town and we take care of it ourselves.

  There were seven paintings commissioned for the hall, by six different artists. Why Rembrandt’s massive effort—which we know as The Night Watch (a name that was first used a century and a half after the work was made)—became one of the world’s most famous paintings, up there with the likes of the Mona Lisa, The Scream, and Whistler’s Mother, has seemingly little to do with the circumstances in which it was made. True, it was (contrary to some accounts) a hit right from the start. But its fame dimmed subsequently, as did that of its creator. For a few years, from his midtwenties to his midthirties, Rembrandt’s intensity fit that of the moment, when Amsterdammers’ self-consciousness as innovators and liberals came to a head, but otherwise the drama and emotional depth he incessantly searched for was a bit unseemly to the staid Dutch: he was, ultimately, too emotional a painter for them. He came back into vogue only in the nineteenth century, when the Netherlands was trying to forge a new national patriotism and identity. The Night Watch, so grand and opulent and stately, was chosen as the centerpiece of the new Rijksmuseum and given a hall all its own. What Rembrandt had painted to represent the civic-mindedness of Amsterdammers, which afterward the Dutch pushed away as rather un-Dutch in its grandeur, was now repurposed as the embodiment of Dutchness. And so, late in the day, Rembrandt became a national hero. In 1852 he was memorialized with a statue. Today, larger than life, he presides over the café patios and outdoor marketeers of Rembrandt Square, a few minutes’ walk from his old stomping grounds.

  The house where Rembrandt and Saskia lived on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat was a flashy rental. But it wasn’t good enough. He had to buy a house—a grand and expensive one, two doors from Van Ulyenburgh’s studio. He spent money freely in these days: on the house, on jewels for Saskia. He was a young man on the move, taking on commissions as fast as humanly possible, and there was no reason to think the flow of work and money would ever end. He worked with demonic energy, not only painting but running an academy, teaching students, and dealing in other people’s artwork.

  The house he bought (which is today an expertly tended museum devoted to his life and art) became his nemesis. He paid too much for it—with the flight of wealth to the new canals, prices in the neighborhood had dropped, but the owners of this house had held out for a high price and he was willing to pay—and around the time they moved in his career began to falter. Why? The American Rembrandt scholar Gary Schwartz—sitting in the living room of his own luxe villa, a 1725-era house in the village of Maarssen on the outskirts of Amsterdam, which he and his Dutch wife, Loekie, bought as students in 1968 for, he told me, a pittance—gave me his theory of Rembrandt’s decline. Alongside the emotional intensity of his work, Schwartz stressed “a problem with authority. The norm was to form a relationship with a wealthy patron. Rembrandt did that. But, time and again, he started fights. He burned bridges.”

  Amsterdam was an oligarchy, run by a handful of wealthy merchant families. When he was fresh from Leiden and had completed the Tulp painting, Rembrandt was the hot young artist everyone wanted to have “do” them. But he didn’t tend the relationships. One of his fellow artists actually complained that Rembrandt, as the city’s leading painter, was dragging down the whole guild by not kowtowing to the great families. He was a workaholic, who would rather paint than attend obligatory social functions. And he got into fights with rich patrons about money and commissions.

  Rembrandt’s opposite on the Amsterdam scene was a former pupil, Govert Flinck. Flinck was happy to perform the social obligations Rembrandt despised and was also willing to change his style to suit changing tastes, making his paintings lighter and softer. By the time of the commission for the kloveniers, Flinck, the new golden boy, was given not one grand panel but two to paint.

  Meanwhile, life at home had also clouded over. Saskia had delivered three children, all of whom had died in infancy. In 1641, she was pregnant again, and this time she was ailing. Rembrandt must have been in a panic. He needed help.

  Thus Geertje Dircx from Edam, who had lost her husband and come to Amsterdam in search of work, showed up on the doorstep of his fine house. It isn’t clear whether Saskia was still alive when Geertje began working in the household or if she had already died, leaving Rembrandt with a newborn son to care for. In any case, Geertje took over the household and, after Saskia’s death in June 1642, two recently widowed people who had each been drawn to the magnet of Amsterdam were living together under the same roof: one a peasant woman from the north, the other one of the world’s great artists. So began a love affair. It’s said that his Danae, a masterwork charged with golden light in which a voluptuous nude woman languishes in bed, one arm raised to welcome her lover Zeus, was first modeled on Saskia but that Rembrandt then painted her with Geertje’s face. He also gave Geertje some of his dead wife’s jewels.

  The golden glow in their relationship seems to have lasted for quite a while, but when it left it didn’t just fade but went black. Seven years after Saskia’s death Rembrandt took on a new housemaid, a twenty-three-year-old beauty named Hendrickje Stoffels, and fell for her at once. At this point Geertje’s forceful personality asserts itself onto the historical record. Reading between the lines of several legal documents, one concludes that there was a fight and that Geertje left the house and moved into rooms above an inn called the Black Bones. On June 15, 1649, in the presence of witnesses, Rembrandt made her a formal offer of separation, which included an annual “alimony” of 60 guilders. Geertje was furious and filed suit against him, claiming that he had promised her marriage and was in breach of his promise. Rembrandt didn’t show up in court but instead tried another offer: this time 160 guilders per year. What he was most concerned about was the jewels that had belonged to Saskia and that he had given to Geertje: he wanted her to make clear in her will that on her death they would go to his son, Titus.

  Another meeting took place, this time in the kitchen of Rembrandt’s house. She found Rembrandt waiting with a notary, who would make the new agreement binding. Geertje arrived with a witness, a shoemaker named Octaef Octaefszoon who lived nearby. But things got ugly; Geertje exploded in anger and refused to sign.

  Eventually, Rembrandt took a dramatic step—something that Rembrandt scholars for decades kept out of accounts of his life. He had witnesses from the neighborhood testify that Geertje had descended into a life of loose morals, and asked a court to have her committed to a home for wayward women.

  We don’t know what truths lay beneath this sord
id he-said, she-said affair, but Rembrandt’s ultimate play—having a bothersome ex-lover committed to a workhouse—can’t be seen as anything other than despicable. Gary Schwartz says he considers it evidence that the great miner of humanity’s interior life was equally capable of great inhumanity. Geertje spent five years in the workhouse, was released in 1655 (despite Rembrandt’s obections), and apparently died shortly thereafter.

  What can we say about Geertje Dircx’s experience in this new kind of society to which she had been drawn in the hope of benefiting from its lauded emphasis on individual freedoms? Maybe that the great promise was matched by great peril. Maybe that, as in any other society, fate was largely determined by power. Then or now, for someone like her, whether power is measured in money or titles or some other coin doesn’t really matter; if you are among the least powerful, you’ll probably lose.

  Rembrandt’s life after Geertje had some ups but mostly continued its downward trajectory. Hendrickje Stoffels remained his unwed partner; he painted several more images that would become iconic, including The Jewish Bride and more self-portraits, all of which, in contrast to the endless variation of emotions he captured in himself earlier, seemed to bear the same slightly dazed expression, puffed with age and splotched by sorrow. By 1660 he was bankrupt and, at the end of a long and tawdry process, lost his house and possessions. Two years later, still needing money, he sold Saskia’s grave; her bones were removed to make way for someone else’s. The next year Hendrickje died, and shortly after his son, Titus, died, at the age of twenty-six. Rembrandt himself died the following year, even as his work was being feted in foreign capitals. In one of those last self-portraits, as Simon Schama crisply notes, “Rembrandt’s face is lit only by the illumination of his unsparing frankness.” He was sixty-three but looked a decade older.

  For all its superhuman scope, there is one remarkable gap in Rembrandt’s career. The Dutch author Fred Feddes has marveled at how one of history’s greatest visual artists could live in Amsterdam more or less exactly during the span of its golden age and almost completely fail to capture the explosive physical manifestation of its growth and glow. The city was not only transforming itself during his life but transforming what a city was and could be. It was refashioning itself around the individual, around human comforts and conveniences and profit making, focusing urban planning on what was good for business and pleasing to the eye. It was becoming a new kind of place. And Rembrandt ignored it all.

  Or more: he willed it away. He didn’t paint the new canals, the new buildings, the glorious churches, the forest of masts in the harbor, the spectacular new City Hall, which was a wonder of seventeenth-century Europe. Instead, he drew the pokey old City Hall—after it had been destroyed by a fire. And while the new one was being constructed, he put the building—which people were making pilgrimages to see go up—literally behind him in order to sketch a bucolic scene in the other direction, of the sleepy old Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal canal. He wandered in the city and the surrounding countryside with his sketchbook, and the results give a retro impression. A lazy windmill against a flat sky. A smudge of trees on a thin horizon. Thatch-roofed farmers’ cottages. A cottage hemmed in by a rickety plank fence and towered over by trees. The city looks in his drawings like a medieval village.

  Another artist of his time, one far less well known in our day but quite famous in his, was in this respect and others the opposite of Rembrandt. Jan van der Heyden was a teenager living on Dam Square when the aforementioned fire broke out in the old City Hall, and the sight of it—the wonder and the horror—set him on his career path. He seems to have been struck by the fragility of the city: how quickly civilization can be swallowed up by chaos and destruction. He fashioned himself into the father of modern city services, beginning with firefighting. He invented the leather fire hose and perfected the water pump, making the first genuinely usable fire engine. He founded Amsterdam’s fire department, became its fire chief, chronicled eighty city fires over the course of his career in order to perfect methods, and publicized his efforts for the benefit of others in Europe in a book he entitled A Description of Fire Engines with Water Hoses and the Method of Fighting Fires Now Used in Amsterdam.

  Van der Heyden also invented the streetlamp and created perhaps the world’s first assembly line so that unskilled workers could turn out the necessary parts. He and his brother founded a company to produce all of this equipment on a large scale and sold it to the city (to the same department of which he was the head). They outfitted Amsterdam’s canals with 2,556 streetlamps and supplied its fire department with seventy fire engines. His designs spread around Europe: in France and Germany, the Van der Heyden fire engine remained the template until machine power began to take over in the late 1800s.

  In addition to all of this, Van der Heyden was an artist. If you were to put his paintings of Amsterdam side by side with Rembrandt’s, you would swear they depicted different cities in different eras. Van der Heyden—who has sometimes been called the Dutch Leonardo da Vinci—was interested in the practical functioning of a modern metropolis. As an inventor, he fussed over the optimal distance between lamp posts and worked out the ideal mix of oils to burn in the lamps. In his paintings, he gave precise renderings of what was new and grand: the canals and bridges of the new district and, seemingly most meaningful to him, the new City Hall, a temple to the people of Amsterdam that had arisen from the ashes of the fire that had dictated his life’s course, its facade gleaming imperially in the sunlight. This painting was bought by Cosimo III de’ Medici, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, when he visited Amsterdam. Cosimo acquired Van der Heyden’s regal image of City Hall as a souvenir of a futuristic city that impressed him as it did other golden age tourists.

  There are almost never people in the cityscapes of Van der Heyden, a fact that precisely sets off the two sides of liberalism that he and Rembrandt evoke. The liberal passion that burned in Van der Heyden’s breast was in the service of the kind of external structure that might provide a habitat in which personal freedoms could flourish. In a word: civilization. Ensuring that people could walk down a street in the evening without fear of getting clubbed in the darkness was the sort of thing that excited Jan van der Heyden. His artistic longing, if we can call it that, was to craft a city that would provide services and protections that would allow individuals to find a space opening within themselves, a space in which to explore who they were, to question their being and their place in the world. That internal space is of course where Rembrandt lived in his deepest self. Surely this is the reason he showed no interest in the outward growth of the new Amsterdam.

  There is, however, a conjunction between the liberalisms of Rembrandt and Van der Heyden, a place where outer and inner personal spaces come together. Consider the archetypal monuments of certain cities, the buildings that seem to give clues to their souls. Think of the association of Paris with Notre Dame Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower, of London with Big Ben, of New York with the Empire State Building. Amsterdam, at first blush, has no such monument. The thirteen million people a year who visit the city are not in a rush to see the Royal Palace on Dam Square (which is what the seventeenth-century City Hall became when Napoleon Bonaparte took over and installed his brother Louis Napoleon as “King of Holland” in 1806). And the city’s modest churches, most of which could fit inside Notre Dame, hardly have crowd-control issues.

  People come to Amsterdam to see hundreds of far less extravagant buildings that line its canals: individual homes. These are also works of art, but modest ones. Each is made of brick and traditionally topped by a decorative gable, which covers the roof line. The changing fashions of passing decades of the seventeenth century remain enshrined in the array of gables that confront you as you walk down a street: step gable, spout gable, bell gable … Above the door a gable stone might be set into the brickwork; this personalized the house with a carving, say, of barrels, which said in effect, “Here lives a cooper,” or one of sheep that announced a wool merchant, or,
as a general statement of piety within, a picture of Adam and Eve or the Flight from Egypt. Typically a canal house is reached via a small platform between a porch and a step: a stoop (the word comes from the Dutch stoep).

  Each of these canal houses is an exquisite memorial to something so elemental to who we are that its significance might easily escape notice. For each of Amsterdam’s canal houses was built to hold a family. Each represents what matters most to us. The idea of family was not born in the seventeenth century, but the concept of home as a personal, private, intimate space may have been. The writer Witold Rybczynski, in his fine little book Home: A Short History of an Idea, traces the idea of the home as a vessel in which our subjective selves can both rest and flourish to the kind of society that the seventeenth-century Dutch developed. That society was not formed, as others in Europe were, by feudalism: by kings and courts. Where elsewhere there were big cities and countryside, the Dutch landscape was notable for being dotted with towns. The Dutch were urban. They were also, going back into the Middle Ages (and also having no doubt to do with the climate and conditions in which they lived), modest, thrifty, careful, and rather obsessed with household cleanliness: mopping floors and polishing silver and scrubbing stoops.

  The influx of wealth and the explosion of new ideas that came in the seventeenth century did not wipe out these traits but rather solidified them. The “modern” canal house of the seventeenth century was meant, first of all, for everybody. The egalitarian nature of Dutch society translated into a sense that, while a richer person’s surroundings might be somewhat fancier than someone else’s, out-and-out opulence was in bad taste. A Nicolaes Tulp or a Rembrandt at his height might opt for a double-sized canal house, but compared with their counterparts in Paris or London, wealthy Amsterdammers lived modestly. They had few servants, and relations between servants and their employers didn’t follow the lines of the class system in place elsewhere. Rich people from other parts of Europe expressed amazement to see, for example, that in the canal house of a wealthy Amsterdammer the servant ate meals with the family.