Imbibing sprits was a common pastime throughout Europe, but the hottest new vice was smoking tobacco, which had replaced snuff as the guilty pleasure of choice. Originally, tobacco was imported from Virginia, but the precious leaf proved too expensive for the five-pipe-a-day habit many Dutchmen were developing. The solution was to grow tobacco locally and create a more affordable blend — part Virginia, part Dutch, and sauced with flavors such as vanilla, nutmeg, or beer. Regardless of how it tasted (some combinations were famously foul), smokers were hooked, and the substance was so strong it kept the population on a perpetual nicotine high. “The smell of the republic was the smell of tobacco,” a visitor noted.4 Or, in the words of a more candid observer, “The entire Netherlands stank of tobacco.” 5
Not surprisingly, the same young men who drank and smoked loved to listen to music, and the popular way to experience it was through songbooks and sing-a-longs. Every home had a collection of songs, usually printed, illustrated, and bound in a treasured album. Families and friends gathered to sing selections from such anthologies as “Apollo Among the Goddesses of Song” and “The Delights of Piety.” There were patriotic songs celebrating great moments in Dutch history, happy songs about the pleasures of daily life, and many others, including ones that were a bit off-color. Songbooks were also a way of expressing emotion, especially among the young. If a boy liked a girl, he sent her a song to let her know how he felt, and she would carry it everywhere.
Fabritius may have rebelled by wearing his hair long and dressing in fashionably loose and colorful garments (with the obligatory gorget), but when it came to choosing a profession, he aspired to become an artist, just like his father. Only one painting attributed to Pieter Carelsz exists today — a subtly colored panel depicting the Reformed Church in Middenbeemster, surrounded by clouds, sunbeams, and an angel holding a drawing of one of the famous Beemster dairy cows. The work suggests he was imaginative and technically adept, talents that he passed on to his son, who was eager to learn.
The Reformed Church portrayed in Pieter Carelsz’ painting was an important part of Fabritius’ life. Designed in 1616 by the eminent Dutch architect Hendrik de Keyser, the stately building was finished in 1623 and immediately became the center of village life. While Pieter Carelsz continued to teach school and paint, he also found time to serve as sexton, recording births and deaths, among other duties. His house was next door to the church and his children grew up in the shadow of the building and its Linden trees.
The minister who baptized Fabritius died in 1639 and was replaced by a young, dynamic clergyman from Amsterdam in 1640. Tobias Velthusius (a Latinized form of the Dutch name Velthuys, or Velthuysen) was twenty-five years old and full of ideas about modern-day theology. Accompanied by his younger sister, Aeltje, he moved into the Middenbeemster parsonage, which was adjacent to the schoolhouse.
Tobias and Aeltje came from a prosperous family. Their older brother, Abraham Velthuys, was a wealthy draper and fabric merchant who had an international clientele and owned several houses in the Oudezij Armsteeg, a fashionable Amsterdam neighborhood. Unmarried sisters often assumed domestic responsibilities for their brothers, so Aeltje bid goodbye to Abraham and her sister Gertje to move to the country and tend to Tobias. However, she was no one’s idea of a housekeeper. Aeltje was cultivated — she owned (and presumably had read) a small library of books, and possessed an assortment of fine jewelry, including gold bracelets, necklaces, and diamond rings. When Fabritius saw this girl next door, he was instantly dazzled. And, when Aeltje looked at the boy next door, she saw a young man who seemed to have it all. Eighteen-year-old Fabritius was handsome, confident, good with children (as evidenced by his strong relationships with his many younger brothers and sisters), and artistic. Thanks to his schoolmaster father, he was also well-educated, conversant in the classics, and very serious about his painting. He and Aeltje very quickly fell in love.
Courtship in that era took many forms in the Netherlands. In some parts of the country, the custom of “bundling,” or queesten, as it was called in Holland, permitted couples to cuddle innocently on the maiden’s bed. If the boy got too frisky, the girl banged on an iron pot with fire-tongs and her parents came running. Middenbeemster was more cosmopolitan than that. Fabritius might have shyly tied a wreath of flowers on Aeltje’s front door and awaited her response. If she welcomed his advances, she would place a small basket of blossoms on her window sill, or pin a bud from his bouquet onto her dress, for all to see. Visits and conversations followed, then an official engagement, which was usually sealed with an exchange of double rings.
On September 1, 1641, the Reformed Church announced the couple’s “banns,” a public proclamation of their upcoming marriage, on three consecutive Sundays. “Carel Pietersz Fabritius, bachelor of the Beemster, and Aeltje Hermensdr of Hasselt, both living in the Beemster, hereby {declare their intention to} marry.” 6 The banns gave anyone who might object to the union an opportunity to protest. Meanwhile, the couple prepared for their wedding.
It was a happy time marked by celebrations that were unusually playful for the normally no-nonsense Dutch. Invitations were extended, and the church and reception site were draped with garlands and other festive touches. Even the groom’s pipe was decorated with special leaves for the occasion. On September 22, the day of the wedding, Fabritius and Aeltje led a procession of family and friends from the Reformed Church to their nuptial dinner. Many courses were served, music was played, and guests congratulated the couple with poems and songs. At the end of the celebration, friends engaged in traditional wedding games, such as pretending to kidnap the bride to hide her from the groom. Eventually, the guests went home and Fabritius and Aeltje shyly retired to a special bedroom to spend their first night together.
The wedding was just the beginning of the exciting life they had planned. The newlyweds were moving to Amsterdam, where Fabritius would proudly become an apprentice to Rembrandt van Rijn, certainly the greatest artist in the Netherlands, and arguably the greatest in the world.
Chapter Two
That Fabritius moved to Amsterdam following the wedding is the widely accepted version of events, but the art historian Gero Seelig has proposed a different scenario. He suggests that Fabritius followed a more traditional path for art students at the time, and had earlier been an apprentice of Rembrandt, when he was a young teenager. If that were the case, he would have traveled back and forth between Amsterdam and Middenbeemster for a few years before meeting Aeltje, marrying her, and bringing her to the city to start their life together. Whether Fabritius joined Rembrandt’s school in the late 1630s or in the early 1640s, he was nonetheless fortunate to have had the opportunity. In 1641, Rembrandt was thirty-five years old and at the height of his powers and popularity. He had money, fame, and a personal life as big and as vibrant as the canvases he painted.
The son of a miller, Rembrandt was born in 1606 in Leiden, a city famous for its university and its textile industry. He attended Latin school and studied at the university, but what he really wanted to do was paint. Nothing in young Rembrandt’s background suggested the prodigious talent that manifested itself when he first put brush to canvas. He persuaded his parents to let him pursue a career in art and apprenticed with the artist Pieter Lastman, who had strong technical ties to Italian masters such as Caravaggio. By the time Rembrandt was twenty-five, he had made a name for himself as a history painter with a special gift for depicting light and shadow. Chiaroscuro, the Italian word for the use of brightness and darkness in art, was his forte. Whatever their subject, his canvases had great visual drama and movement.
In 1631, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where a particular project launched his career. Seventeenth-century Hollanders had an appetite for a type of painting best described as a “corporate portrait.” To honor a person, or commemorate an occasion, members of a guild, a governing body, or a military unit contributed money to cover the cost of a group portrait. Each man paid for his own likeness in the work; hence the ex
pression “going Dutch.” The artist was free to place these real-life patrons in a dramatic (or even historic) situation, with the stipulation that their faces had to be recognizable.
The Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons commissioned Rembrandt to paint Dr. Nicholas Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm. Here, Rembrandt showed the real-life Dr. Tulp, a distinguished physician, dissecting a corpse in the presence of seven associates. The picture was a sensation. Each man looked distinctive (and distinguished), as he would in a really fine portrait, viewers marveled, yet the painting worked as a compelling history piece that transcended time and place.
The very characteristics that made some people love Rembrandt’s work — his tendency to ignore rules dictated by generations of complacent classicists, his fondness for “common” people and the rough textures and hues of real life, the fearless vitality of his brushwork, the freshness of his compositions — made others hate it. His critics said he lacked refinement and self-control. They accused him of slashing at his canvas with “violent and repetitive strokes,” and hiding his technical shortcomings behind expanses of darkness. Rembrandt was “much more highly acclaimed than his worth,” they sniffed.
Naysayers aside, Rembrandt was on a winning streak that extended to his personal life when he fell in love with an adorable young woman named Saskia van Uylenburgh, a well-to-do orphan. They married in 1624, and the single obstacle to their bliss was that they were unable to start a family. Saskia became pregnant three times, but each of their infants died — a son and two daughters. Rembrandt expressed his grief by drawing pictures of children, as if these pen-and-ink counterparts could stand in for the babies they lost. Finally, in 1641, Saskia gave birth to a healthy child, a son they named Titus.
Through Saskia’s family connections — her cousin was a successful art dealer — Rembrandt was introduced to a circle of rich patrons who lined up to have their portraits painted by the celebrated artist. He was so busy, one observer noted wryly, that buyers who wanted a Rembrandt had “to beg for it as well as pay for it.” However, as quickly as Rembrandt made money — and he made a good deal — he spent it. He loved to shop for art, collectables, clothes, antiques, curiosities, anything that was beautiful, interesting, or could be used as a prop in one of his paintings. Eventually, he needed a larger residence to store his purchases. In 1639, he bought a grand townhouse for 13,000 guilders, a price that required him to take out a large mortgage.
Rembrandt was happy to stem the rising tide of debt with a robust supplementary income from his expanding workshop of assistants and apprentices. Most artists had at least one apprentice who toiled as a studio dogsbody in exchange for art lessons, a way for fledgling artists to learn their craft. However, a spectacularly successful artist such as Rembrandt was able to attract an entire school of students, as many as fifty at a time, and each one paid the handsome sum of 100 guilders a year for the privilege of studying with, and working for, the master.
Rembrandt’s workshop was essentially a graduate school. The young artists who enrolled there knew the basics of drawing, canvas stretching, paint-mixing, and the like. But they signed on for advanced training with the “widely renowned” Rembrandt because they hoped to learn his secrets. If they could paint just like him, perhaps they could become as famous or, better still, as prosperous.
They came from the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and other European countries. Some apprentices had wealthy parents with connections in the art world, while others had talent. Fabritius had both. His affluent brother-in-law Abraham was in a position to supply him with the introduction and the pricey tuition needed to enter the workshop. It is also possible that Rembrandt, who had a great eye, had seen Fabritius’ work, recognized his rare gift, and decided to cultivate it.
In Amsterdam, Fabritius and Aeltje set up housekeeping in a small place on the Runstraart, a neighborhood identified by a sign that read “Dutch Garden.” While Aeltje stayed home — learning, in fairly short order, the happy news that she was expecting a baby — Fabritius joined Rembrandt’s current class of assistants and apprentices. They were an enthusiastic bunch, ready to set the world on fire with their paintbrushes. But, first, they had to bend to their master’s will. By all accounts, Rembrandt was a despotic ruler who was impatient, demanding, and eccentric, personality traits that were acceptable only in a genius. He was often in a foul mood, had little regard for polite behavior, and wore dirty clothes that looked worse as the day progressed because he unconsciously wiped his paintbrushes on the fabric.
Students were hard put to decide what was worse: being ignored by this snarling beast, or having him slash his improvements onto their canvases. A few lines hastily drawn by Rembrandt could make any young artist feel inadequate. The German painter Max Lieberman summed up this feeling when he lamented, “Whenever I see a Frans Hals [another famous Dutch artist], I want to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.”
Fabritius and his classmates settled into a routine. The workshop was on an upper floor in Rembrandt’s house, and part of the space was divided into small cubicles. The older and more experienced artists gathered in a group to sketch life models — men and women who posed nude to demonstrate the fine points of human anatomy. Sometimes classes were held at night so Rembrandt could hang oil lamps and teach his pupils how to manage light and shadow.
The best students became so adept at mimicking his style that Rembrandt was able to turn their homework into another thriving business. He maintained a gallery in one of the home’s front rooms, where he showed paintings to prospective buyers. Rembrandt expanded his inventory by assigning his students to copy his works. Then, he sold the best facsimiles to lower-end customers who couldn’t afford the real thing. One workshop alumnus estimated that Rembrandt made two and half thousand guilders a year on these authorized “replicas.”
Despite the fact that the younger apprentices paid handsomely for the privilege of joining the studio, they spent most of their time performing menial tasks, such as stretching canvases and mixing paints. Every morning, Rembrandt selected the day’s palette, and it was up to the apprentices to grind pigment and mix the colors. Oil paint lost its elasticity quickly, so it had to be freshly made, and used right away, or stored briefly in a pig’s bladder.
The students worked hard, but this fraternity of artists, like all fraternities, liked to have fun. They enjoyed playing practical jokes on Rembrandt, who was famously parsimonious. A popular trick was to paint coins on the floor and watch gleefully as the master tried to pick them up and pocket them. Even though he could be incredibly surly, Rembrandt had a good sense of humor. One day, he overheard a student playing “Adam and Eve” with one of the models in a cubicle. Rembrandt gave the couple just enough time to take off their clothes before bursting into the room to say, “Because you are naked, you must get out of Paradise,” casting them out of their “Garden of Eden.” Everyone laughed as the embarrassed pair frantically tried to cover themselves before they were out on the street.
Although Fabritius was a bit older than the others, and married as well, he found a friend in the group, a young apprentice named Samuel van Hoogstraten, who came from a similar background. Hoogstraten grew up in the town of Dordrecht and, like Fabritius, was the son of an artist who taught him everything he knew. After his father died, Hoogstraten moved to Amsterdam to study with Rembrandt. He was an earnest adolescent who liked to engage in serious philosophical conversations about art. During one of their heated talks, Fabritius posed an intriguing question: “What are the certain characteristics and fruits of the spirit in a young pupil, which give hope that he will become a good painter?” In other words, what makes a great artist?
For Hoogstraten, the answer was passion — passion and an insatiable desire, a burning need, in fact, to understand the very “soul of art.” Yes, a great artist had to learn the ways of the past, but he also had to “find out everything by his own effort,” to strive to be original. Fabritius had that passion and curiosity. Even a
fter spending an entire day in the workshop, he walked home to Aeltje to paint — a hazardous trip because Amsterdam was pitch black at night and pedestrians were known to fall into the canals and drown. Their house was filled with art supplies and canvases in various stages of completion, and there was always another idea waiting to be brought to life.
A young artist faced so many decisions. Because of the strong, competitive art market in Holland, painters usually specialized in a particular kind of work — having a “brand” made it easier to establish an identity and sell. Landscapes were popular, as were genre paintings depicting scenes of everyday life. Other specialties included portraits, still lifes, and history paintings, which featured subjects taken from the Bible, mythology, or world events.
Then there was the question of style. Once an artist settled upon what he wanted to paint, he had to determine how to paint it. Would his brushwork be rough (ruwe) or smooth (fijne). And how would he handle the all-important houding, the use of color and tone to position elements on his canvas? Most teachers would take the posture that bright colors moved images forward, while dark colors made them recede. Rembrandt, as evidenced by his painting The Night Watch, thought differently.
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