The cradle woven from willow rods
“REMBRANT VAN RIJN, SON OF HARMEN GERRITSZOON VAN RIJN, AND Neeltgen Willems van Suydtbrouck, was born in the City of Leyden, on the 15th of July in the year of 1606.” This was reported by Jan Jansz Orlers in the very first published biographical sketch of Rembrandt.
It was in the second edition of 1641 of his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden that Orlers added to his existing lives of the leading artists—local luminaries such as Cornelis Engebrechtsz, Lucas van Leyden, Isaac van Swanenburg, and his contemporaries Joris van Schooten, Jan van Goyen and David Bailly—a mini-biography of Rembrandt.
Orlers’s brief life of Rembrandt is viewed to this day as an important source. We still adhere to the date he gives for Rembrandt’s birth, 15th July 1606, since it appears in the first line of the first biographical sketch. We have no way of verifying the date since the Pieterskerk, the church attended by the Van Rijn family, did not start keeping a baptismal register until after 1621.
Orlers would undoubtedly have conducted his own enquiries to eke out facts about Rembrandt’s life. The chronicler lived diagonally opposite the needlewoman Lieven Hendrixcz, whose son, the artist Jan Lievens, was Rembrandt’s closest friend and associate in his youth, as well as his fiercest rival.
This gifted young neighbour also featured in Orlers’s book with a little biography that was clearly designed to impress. It was twice as long as Rembrandt’s. From the 1640 inventory of Orlers’s household effects, we learn that he possessed a fantastic library and ten works by Jan Lievens, including The Four Evangelists, Painted from Life and a Peasant Breakfast. He did not own a single painting by Rembrandt.
Orlers probably consulted the Lievens family on the matter of Rembrandt’s date of birth. He may even have gone over to Weddesteeg to ask Rembrandt’s mother. Neeltje was still alive in 1640, a year before the publication of the second edition of the Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden. Nonetheless, that does not mean that the date is definitely correct. In the seventeenth century, people often had quite a fuzzy idea of even their precise age. In the second state of an etching with a self-portrait in which Rembrandt depicted himself wearing an elegant black hat, and which he himself dated 1631, he initially carved a note into the etching plate to the effect that he was twenty-seven, “AET 27”, only to change the “27” into “24”. The latter would mean that he was born in 1607.
This is relevant, since when he and Saskia van Uylenburgh gave notice of their intention to marry, on 10th June 1634 in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, he registered his age as twenty-six, which also suggests that he was born in 1607. Neither of these inscribed ages agrees with the date of birth given in the Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden. Still, since even Rembrandt got his dates mixed up, the date of birth recorded by Orlers is the one that has been adopted in the history books.
In planning anniversary celebrations, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes 1606 as the year of Rembrandt’s birth. Yet the wall plaque in the gallery of the Night Watch—the altar in the Netherlands’ national cathedral of art—states that the master was born in 1605. Even this is not inconceivable. The very first record we have of his name, an entry for 20th May 1620 in the volumen inscriptionum of Leiden University, states that he was fourteen. If we assume that the given birthday of 15th July is correct, he was born in 1605.
In a “literary sketch” published in a periodical in 1860, “Een pelgrimstocht naar de Weddesteeg”, Carel Vosmaer describes a pregnant woman rushing to hide herself, one fine morning in mid July 1606, in an alcove bed shielded by curtains made of saai, Leiden’s best-selling cloth. Her small daughter, Machtelt, is hurrying down Noordeinde, the nearby thoroughfare leading to the district on the opposite side of Kort Rapenburg, some 200 metres away—the district called Paplepel.
Vosmaer writes: “I see [the child] fetch the woman above whose door hangs a plaque with a picture of a tiny child, with the inscription ‘GOD IS MY HELP’; I see that woman follow the little girl, who runs ahead and keeps looking back over her shoulder at her, all the way to the green saai curtains. Quick, Harmen, down from your mill—and good luck with the little boy that has been born!”
In the seventeenth century, childbirth was women’s business. Men were kept out of the way until it was all over. Not until the child had drunk from the mother’s breast and been carefully bound in cloths was it placed in its father’s arms for a moment, like a neat parcel. Each delivery was a perilous event. It was not uncommon for women to die from the complications of childbirth or from puerperal fever, and newborn infants often failed to survive. Frequent though such deaths were, the misery they occasioned was no less intense. The whole family grieved, then as now.
Cornelia Willemsdr van Zuytbroeck (“Neeltje”) was no longer young when she gave birth to Rembrandt. We do not know her date of birth, but she must have been around thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Rembrandt was her ninth child—the sixth to survive, after Gerrit, Adriaen, Machtelt, Cornelis and Willem. After Rembrandt would come one more girl—Elisabeth, who was known as Lijsbeth, like her grandmother. Three of Neeltje’s children died very young, possibly as newborn infants. Two were buried without names in the Pieterskerk in 1604. Neeltje must have been thinking of her two dead babies when she got the cradle out, ready for a new child.
By a stroke of good fortune, we know what that cradle looked like. In one of the “testimony books” that are preserved in Leiden’s archives is a signed statement drawn up on 26th October 1612 by “Harman Gerritsz, miller”. He took an oath that the “infant’s cradle, woven from willow rods,” from the probate inventory of the bargeman’s son Gerrit Pietersz belonged to him.
Harmen was the uncle and guardian of this Gerrit Pietersz. When the latter declared bankruptcy, Harmen made it clear to the city’s sheriffs that he had lent his nephew the cradle. Otherwise it would be seized by the bailiffs. This was the little cradle in which Rembrandt must have slept as an infant.
The cradle’s financial value was negligible, and certainly cannot explain why Harmen went to such lengths to get it back, even submitting his claim to the city’s tribunal. This document makes it clear that he was driven by an emotional attachment. In 1612 he did not expect to have any more children. Neeltje was forty-three—a late arrival was highly unlikely. Even so, Harmen wanted the cradle back. It represented the love he felt for his family.
In Rembrandt’s painting The Holy Family with Angels (1645), Mary sits reading by a flickering hearth, her feet on the foot stove. In the background, Joseph the carpenter is hard at work. His tools hang on the wall. Out of a corner of heavenly light, a few cherubs tumble down into the domestic scene.
Karl Marx once wrote: “Rembrandt painted the Mother of God as a Dutch peasant woman.” About this, Marx was quite right. That is the joy of this painting: it is totally unpretentious. The Virgin Mary radiates an ostensibly simple beauty. Heavenly and earthly qualities merge: the sacredness is woven into the scene’s everyday domesticity.
Rembrandt enchants us here with the heavenly light that touches Mary’s white collar and headdress and is reflected in her open book. But he also moves us by showing a single tender gesture: a mother, anxious to check whether her little child can sleep with all that hammering going on, lifts a corner of the veil that she has laid over the hood of the cradle: a rocking cradle woven from willow branches.
The house in which a cradle stood would determine the course of a life: family relationships were crucial. Rembrandt’s mother was the daughter of a baker. She was the third child of Willem Arentsz van Zuytbroeck and Elisabeth Cornelisdr Vinck. Her father originated from Katwijk and his ancestors may possibly have come from the hamlet of Zuytbroeck, near Noordwijk aan Zee. Neeltje’s mother was a daughter of the prosperous grain merchant Cornelis Meesz Vinck (also known as Van Tethrode) and Reympgen Cornelisdr van Banchem. Both came from distinguished Catholic families that had lived in Leiden for generations and remained Catholic when the city’s strict Calvinists took control.
Rembrandt was named after his great-grandmother Reympgen. It was an unusual name—something that would prove useful in later life. He did not really know his maternal great-grandparents or even his grandparents: his grandfather died shortly before his birth, followed by his grandmother when he was just three years old. The house, Het Gulden Vercken (the “Golden Pig”) on Vismarkt, was where his grandparents lived and ran their bakery. It was a large building overlooking the New Rhine in the heart of the city, very close to where the river’s two branches converge. On the other side of the water, the great castle’s battlements towered over the houses.
Along the quaysides of the New Rhine, market salesmen sold their wares each week. Fishermen from Katwijk stood outside the Gulden Vercken, washing and filleting their herring, plaice and bass. Seagulls that had tracked the fishing boats from Katwijk swirled around the market. Fisherwomen walked across the polders from Haarlemmermeer (Haarlem Lake) with baskets of freshwater fish on their heads. Farmers from Zoeterwoude brought butter, milk, cheese and eggs to the city. Less than fifty metres downstream, the great city crane hoisted goods onto the quayside outside the weighhouse all day long. At a stone’s throw from the bakery, on the bridge over the Rhine, was the corn exchange, the scene of a brisk trade in barley, wheat and rye, where Neeltje’s family conducted much of their business.
On market days, the streets were jam-packed. Many doors were left open, since most people lived and worked in their houses. In the Golden Age, unlike the Middle Ages, burghers worked from dawn to dusk, six days a week. In the tower of the town hall a loud bell tolled, ringing out across the city, alerting people to the beginning and end of each working day. Children worked alongside their parents as soon as they were able—from about six years of age.
Jan Steen, The Fish Market in Leiden, c.1646–49.
Neeltje helped out in the bakery as a young girl. She went to serve customers when the baker’s assistant had blown his horn to indicate that there was fresh bread on the shelves. It seems unlikely that she was sent to school to learn to read and write. She signed documents such as her last will and testament with a scribble or a shaky cross. Could she read the Bible? We do not know.
Her sister Maritge married a baker and her brother Cornelis became a baker in the house Loth in the street known as Hogewoerd. Neeltje married a miller’s son—not the same trade but the same social circle. Their fathers would have met frequently at the corn exchange. Neeltje’s parents would have seen Harmen Gerritsz as a suitable match for their daughter.
Harmen and Neeltje were married on 8th October 1589 in the Pieterskerk. On 27th November that same year, Cornelis van Berckel transferred ownership of half of the malt-mill and the southern half of the house on Weddesteeg to his stepson. Harmen paid him 1,800 guilders for the property. Cornelis and Lijsbeth continued to live in the left half of the mill-house, while Harmen and Neeltje were soon raising their young family in the other half.
The information in the city archives is extremely complex because of all the structural alterations, property transfers and allocations and reallocations of land that took place. In 1600, a year after Lijsbeth’s death, Harmen received another portion of his inheritance. Another half of a house, to be shared with his sister’s children. He separated that part of the house from the rest and provided it with a new front door.
The house in which Rembrandt was born, as revealed by the latest, meticulous study of diverse records in the land register, was about six metres wide and three metres in depth. It had a small extension on the south side. In the garden stood an outbuilding that later became the home of one of Rembrandt’s aunts. The Van Rijn family home was more spacious than the houses of most of the city’s weavers, but not by much. Once Harmen and Neeltje’s youngest child had arrived, the house was bursting at the seams.
On 18th October 1622, the Van Rijn family of Weddesteeg, in the district of North Rapenburg, was counted in a census. Each member was duly listed in a column: father, mother and “6 children”, in order of age:
Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn
Neeltgen van Suydtbroeck
Gerrit
Machtelt
Cornelis
Willem
Rembrant
Lijsbeth.
The eldest brother but one, Adriaen, was already married and lived with his wife on Aalmarkt. In addition, a marginal note records that Willem no longer lived at home, but was lodging with the baker Jan Gerritsz on Koepoortsgracht.
Rembrandt made drawings and etchings of families in interiors that give an impression of the living room of his childhood. Parents and children huddle around a single candle with their books or games. We can imagine the youngest boy working endlessly on chalk drawings by the fading light from a smoking oil lamp.
Mother resolutely places her squawking young son outside the door, father admonishes the scamp, while behind their parents the other children watch in curiosity from the doorway. A toddler in a walking-trainer stretches out both arms towards the nursemaid. At night the children sleep together in the alcove bed in one of the rooms. Rembrandt will seldom have been alone. It was never quiet.
When you entered the house—the upper part of the Dutch door would often be left open to admit light—you would step straight onto the tiled floor of the largest room, which extended across the width of the building. An alcove bed nestled in one rear corner, beneath the corkscrew staircase to the upper storey; in the other corner blazed the hearth. Some houses had fireplaces in each room, but not this one. According to a 1644 entry in a city register, it had only two.
Even when both hearths were kept burning day and night, the house was almost always cold and clammy in winter. The plaster on the walls was cracked and full of damp patches caused by rising seepage from the nearby river. Everyone wore multiple layers of garments, which were seldom washed. The house had no bathroom, and the toilet consisted of a wooden barrel covered by a plank with a hole in it, under a lean-to in the small backyard.
The Naughty Boy, 1635.
In the living room stood a heavy wooden table with benches on either side and a cupboard for tableware: pewter plates and earthenware bowls and jugs. A few stone steps led down to a small basement, with a catch basin for rainwater and a few kegs of beer. Sometimes there was a small stock of food: a little basket containing cabbage, parsnips, carrots and onions, and a few apples picked from one of the trees in the kitchen garden that Harmen had purchased in 1610, just beyond Wittepoort.
There were undoubtedly paintings hanging on the walls of Rembrandt’s parental home. At the October market, part of the annual celebrations of the relief of Leiden, the Vismarkt square was full of stalls and dozens of paintings were hung on the walls of the town hall’s main chamber. People could buy a small landscape or a genre painting for a guilder or a little more. And a great many did so.
In between the houses were small alleyways leading to the backyards. The name Weddesteeg derives from wedde + steeg. A wedde is a ford along the river where horses could drink and cool off; steeg means “alley”. The ford was actually moved outside Wittepoort when Rembrandt was a boy. Even so, the clattering of hooves often resonated between the quayside and the houses. The horses belonging to the owners of houses on Noordeinde, whose long gardens extended to the water’s edge, often passed by. Rembrandt’s father would frequently have stationed a donkey or a horse in the backyard for use by the servant whose task it was to deliver sacks of malt flour to their customers. Many people in Leiden kept a goat or a few chickens and geese. And a dog.
Sleeping Dog, 1638–42.
Rembrandt loved dogs. In any case, he certainly loved to include them in his drawings, etchings and paintings. Tail-wagging dogs abound throughout his oeuvre. While Joseph is telling his dreams, a dog is licking its genitals clean. In the foreground of The Good Samaritan there is a defecating dog. A black-and-white canine barks at the severed head of Goliath as David presents it to King Saul. And in a scene drawn from everyday life, a small child, startled by a dog, takes refuge in its mother’s arms.
Only once did Rembrandt make an etching in which the dog itself is the subject. It was doubtless the kind that might often be seen lying outside the door in Weddesteeg. Asleep, head resting on its back paws.