WHERE TO BEGIN? IT HAD TO BE WEDDESTEEG.
I pulled the door shut behind me and walked into town, keeping the tower of the town hall ahead of me. The seventeenth-century step-gables glittered in the sunlight. After the bluestone in the middle of the surface of Breestraat, the crossing that marked the point where medieval Leiden was divided into four parts, I walked faster and with a lighter step because the street gradually slopes downward towards Noordeinde. There I turned right into the narrow passage.
Darkness. Only above my head glittered the brightness of blue sky. On the left the high wall of an old army barracks, farther on, to the right, a plaque in the façade of a monstrous block of flats commemorated an event of many centuries ago:
HERE was born
on 15th July 1606
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
With the approach of the three-hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, a few mutterings sounded here and there among the people of Leiden. In Amsterdam, where the painter settled at twenty-five years of age to accumulate riches and fame, the magnificent house on the street then known as Sint-Anthonisbreestraat, where he lived and worked from 1639 to 1658, was purchased by the local council. It was restored and converted into a museum. Since then, the Rembrandt House has attracted hordes of tourists each year.
Nothing of the kind happened in Leiden. In 1906, a committee of erudite scholars descended upon the house of Rembrandt’s birth. In the gloomy grime of this alley, the elegant gentlemen came upon a derelict stable. A soiled postcard of the interior survives from that era. It shows a crumbling tiled wall and a charred hearth.
A reporter from the local daily newspaper Leidsch Dagblad pocketed the card and went to have a look for himself on 17th May 1906. He was admitted by a stable-hand. On the ground floor was stationed a gleaming, jet-black carriage, “a new-fangled coach with the air of a well-fed parvenu”. The journalist then proceeded to climb the stairs and had the sense of entering a haunted house. “The entire little room is full of shrouds from hearses, dangling from poles like mourning banners.”
Picture postcard showing the remains of the house where Rembrandt was born, Weddesteeg, Leiden.
Picture postcard showing Weddesteeg, Leiden.
The committee had a modest plaque attached to the façade, but otherwise it rather pooh-poohed the house where the city’s most famous son had been born. With the passage of time, all the buildings in Weddesteeg passed into the hands of the printing firm Nederlandsche Rotogravure, which demolished the house in 1927.
For a brief moment, Leiden showed signs of regret. In 1963, a sham Golden Age façade was erected where the house had once stood: just a wall with nothing behind it. The printing firm had plans to reconstruct the interior behind the fake façade. It purchased seventeenth-century items of furniture and stored them in the municipal museum, De Lakenhal. The plans fizzled out.
In 1980, Rotogravure went out of business and the fake façade was torn down again—along with all the buildings in Weddesteeg. Only the 1906 plaque was salvaged and later bricked into the outer wall of the new block of flats. Embarrassingly, the most recent meticulous research in the city archives reveals that even the plaque is in the wrong place: it should have been ten metres farther down the road. For that was where Rembrandt van Rijn was actually born. In a place that had vanished from the world.
When I arrived at the spot, I saw two foreign tourists pointing at the plaque and nodding excitedly. To me, the scene had an air of tragicomedy about it.
Several metres in front of me, a young man on foot wearing a wide-brimmed black hat crossed the bridge over Galgewater and disappeared from sight.
Where was Rembrandt?
Not here.
If I try to remember when and where I first stood face to face with Rembrandt, I hear the creaking boards of an old wooden floor. I must have been about seven, holding my father’s hand on the threshold of the Large Press in the Lakenhal, the dark upper gallery of the Leiden museum, where the syndics inspected cloth samples in the seventeenth century. As I step inside, the wide oak floorboards sound as if they are cracking under my weight. It’s like stepping onto thin ice that might give way at any moment.
It was in the Lakenhal that I saw my first Rembrandt: the 1626 Leiden History Painting, a jam-packed theatrical scene the subject of which is still not known today. It includes a cameo of the young Rembrandt, peering out from behind the sceptre of an imperial figure. Eyes in the dark and a head of wild curls, which he scratched into the wet paint using the back of his brush.
From across the centuries, he met my gaze.
My mother grew up in a house on the bank of the Rhine, where the river flows out of Leiden’s old city centre. The upstairs apartment on Morskade where my grandparents spent their entire life together overlooked a sawmill, the Heesterboom. When the mill’s sails were up and started turning, my grandfather and I would clamber into his little crimson boat and row across the Rhine. Together we would enter the mill and ascend the narrow steps up to the top, where we had a view of the entire city.
From within, the enormous machinery grated and bellowed. The axle went round and round, rotating wooden cogs that in turn caused huge serrated blades to move up and down in a rhythmic roar. In a fountain of wood dust, logs were sawn into pieces as if they were no more substantial than matchsticks.
Rembrandt was a miller’s son: the fact with which almost all biographies of the painter begin. The importance of these origins should not be downplayed: Rembrandt’s father, Harmen Gerritszoon, came from a miller’s family that had lived and worked in Leiden for four generations. He and his family owed their entire existence to the malt-mill. They lived on the wind.
Over the years, many fanciful tales have been spun about Harmen’s mill. We read that Rembrandt had a workshop in it as a young boy, learning about the effects of light there because mills have such small windows. Charming fiction. Arnold Houbraken, who published his lives of Golden Age painters in 1718–1721, informs us that the mill was located between Leiderdorp and Koudekerk. An old picture postcard of that “Rembrandt mill” bears a quatrain that may be rendered:
When Rembrandt painted in his father’s mill, still young,
The glory of his artistic power
Was not buried in the clouds of flour—
From town to town it sounded and shone.
In reality, the mill belonging to Rembrandt’s father stood on the western ramparts, right next to the city gate known as Wittepoort. It was a wooden post-mill, with no room for a studio or a boy painter. The mill of his ancestors had been located just outside the city on the Rhine. It is marked in a bird’s-eye map of Leiden produced by Jacob van Deventer around 1560. In fact it stood, I swear to God, a stone’s throw from the place where my mother grew up and my grandparents spent their entire lives.
Through the tall windows came sunbeams that formed bars on the circular hall, fell across the flared stone steps and illuminated the statue of an ancient goddess. It was the day on which my father took me to enrol as a pupil of Leiden’s municipal grammar school. I was eleven years old.
We knocked on the door of the headmaster’s room and entered a miasma of cigar smoke. A man with a friendly face and glasses with rectangular lenses came out from behind his desk. I noticed that the headmaster wore sandals and thick grey woollen socks. As he spoke to my father, I tilted my head to read the titles in the bookcase: Iliad, Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Aeneid. I would devour the ancient literature, although the translations often defeated me.
The headmaster, Antonius Coebergh van den Braak, was a mild-mannered classics scholar. In retirement he would set about writing the history of six centuries of Leiden’s grammar school, which included the Latin school that Rembrandt had attended.
All these chance convergences nourished a fascination in one boy from Leiden for that other boy from Leiden. When I left home to go to university in Amsterdam, this passion remained undimmed. Besides my main subject, Dutch language and literature, I also attended lectures on art history, including those by Ernst van de Wetering. From my father’s bookcase I purloined Gary Schwartz’s biography of Rembrandt, and devoured it. I often visited the Rijksmuseum to gaze at The Jewish Bride—the painting still bore that title in those days.
What was it that Vincent van Gogh once said about The Jewish Bride? After a friend had left him gazing at Rembrandt’s work in the newly opened Rijksmuseum in 1885, and returned half an hour later, Vincent was still sitting motionless in front of the painting. “Would you believe it,” said Vincent, “and I honestly mean what I say, that I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?”
My love of Rembrandt was rekindled while I was writing the biography of the sculptor, painter and writer Jan Wolkers. “Rembrandt passed like a fever through my blood,” he wrote. From an early age, Wolkers was enthralled by the artist because he had painted so marvellously the scenes that his rigidly devout father read to him from the Bible three times a day. “Religion and brushstrokes appeared to coalesce.”
The young Jan decided to become an artist: he would use paint to create his own world in opposition to the drab Calvinist world of his parents. In 1943, just before his eighteenth birthday, after a summons from the Arbeitseinsatz came through the letterbox at his parents’ house in Oegstgeest ordering him to report for forced labour in Germany, he went into hiding in an attic room in the nearby city of Leiden. He did not consider it an ordeal. On the contrary, it was an opportunity to escape from his father’s hard hand and the scourge of God. For Jan Wolkers, the German occupation meant his own personal liberation.
In the middle of the war, he was the last pupil left at Leiden Academy of Art, Ars Aemula Naturae, whose directors were both ardent supporters of the Dutch Nazi collaborators. At the academy, Jan stood at the mirror drawing himself, his sheet of paper on the easel flanked by reproductions of Rembrandt self-portraits. When the fascist director saw him at work, she said: “One day, you’ll be the Rembrandt of the Third Reich.”
Early in the morning of 15th July 1944, Rembrandt’s birthday, he and a friend paid a tribute to his hero. They went to Weddesteeg, where the house of Rembrandt’s birth had once stood, and hung a wreath to which they attached a quatrain that may be roughly translated:
Of laurel wreaths you have no need,
For speeches now the time has flown.
And they are superfluous indeed:
That you are the greatest by all is known.
Jan Wolkers, Self-portrait, pencil, 1945.
Self-portrait, etching, 1630.
Wolkers then sent an anonymous letter to the local paper, in which he suggested that he had seen two other boys hanging up the wreath. On 16th July 1944, the Dagblad voor Leiden en omstreken printed the final sentence of the letter: “It is all the more poignant that a couple of young lads from Leiden, in spite of this official lack of recognition, should have realized what Rembrandt meant for the Netherlands, and in particular for Leiden, the city of his birth.”
Rembrandt had awakened in Wolkers not only the painter, but also the writer.
From the moment that I embarked on this biography of the young Rembrandt, I started retracing his movements on a daily basis. In the Lakenhal, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague and in the Rijksmuseum, I gazed into his eyes. In the municipal archives in Leiden I hunted down every letter containing a reference to him or the Van Rijn family. I scoured antiquarian stores and bookshops to get my hands on whatever I could find about him.
Lying on my desk is a copy of the book containing the very first biographical sketch of Rembrandt that was ever published: the Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden by Jan Jansz Orlers. In this voluminous chronicle, Orlers dedicated almost a page—exactly 350 words—to “one of the most renowned living Painters of our age” in the second, revised and expanded edition of his work, dating from 1641.
It is a glorious book, Orlers’s declaration of love for Leiden. A potpourri of descriptions of the city, history, miscellaneous scraps of information and several biographical sketches of leading public administrators and artists, including “Rembrant van Rijn”. This was the artist’s original spelling of his name: he did not add the “d” until he settled in Amsterdam.
For me, the book is priceless. It enables me to roam around my own city in the seventeenth century. Through neighbourhoods with evocative names like ’t Land van Beloften, Paplepel and Pelicaenshoeck (“the Land of Promises”, “Porridge-Spoon” and “Pelican’s Corner”) and alleys like Bouwelouwesteeg, Diefsteeg, Stinksteeg and Duizenddraadsteeg (“Bouwe Louwe Alley”, “Thief Alley”, “Stink Alley” and “Thousand Thread Alley”).
Even better was the opportunity Orlers gave me to look through his eyes into buildings that no longer exist. Into the Church of Our Lady, of which all that remains is a vague pattern in the paving stones. Or the former chapel of the Faliede Bagijnen, where the new academy proudly built up its library and installed an anatomy theatre.
The vellum binding of my copy of Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden is smooth and soiled from centuries of use. Orlers would have felt gratified. He was a chronicler, but most of all he was a successful bookseller and city councillor. Four times he was elected as one of the city’s burgomasters.
Not so long ago I stood outside the front door of De Gulden Laers (“The Golden Boot”), where Orlers lived. It was a house packed with books and paintings on Pieterskerk-Choorsteeg, a narrow alley in the shadows of the vast Gothic edifice of the Pieterskerk, the Church of St Peter.
Whenever I found myself unable to write, I set off following the ghost of Rembrandt, roaming the city. Suddenly I remembered that Leiden has its own local expression for a difficult childbirth: “the Pieterskerk must pass through the Choorsteeg”.
It was as if Orlers was winking at me. Since scarcely any personal, intimate documents relating to the young Rembrandt have come down to us, I had to construct him in my biography from his surroundings, from what he saw every day all around him.
I built my sentences from the stones of my city.
LEIDEN, WINTER 2017–SUMMER 2019
MAP OF LEIDEN, JOHANNES BLAEU, 1633
1 The malt-mill (De Rijn) of Rembrandt’s parents.
2 The house in Weddesteeg where Rembrandt was born.
3 The city gate, Wittepoort.
4 Houses belonging to Harmen Gerritsz overlooking Galgewater, possibly Rembrandt’s studio.
5 Main city carpentry yard.
6 Fourth expansion: Walenwijk, a new district built in the period 1611–23.
7 Parental home of Gerrit Dou on Kort Rapenburg.
8 De Drie Haringen, the inn run by the parents of Isaack Jouderville.
9 Noordeinde.
10 ’t Sand, Groenhasegracht.
11 Target-practice yard of the militia which Rembrandt’s father left in 1611 following an accident.
12 Prinsenhof, Rapenburg, where the Winter King’s children lived.
13 House of the Knotter family, where Remonstrant services were held.
14 University building where Rembrandt enrolled as an arts student in 1620.
15 Botanical gardens, academic herb garden with covered gallery or ambulacrum.
16 Pieterskerk, the church in which Rembrandt’s parents married and were buried.
17 Quarter where the Puritans settled 1609–20.
18 Latin school attended by Rembrandt.
19 De Rosencrans, parental home of Jan Lievens in Pieterskerkchoorsteeg.
20 De Gulden Laers, home of the bookseller, city chronicler and burgomaster J.J. Orlers.
21 House of Hendrick Swaerdecroon, where Johannes Wtenbogaert lodged as a student.
22 Leiden town hall on Breestraat.
23 Studio of Jacob van Swanenburg, Rembrandt’s first teacher, Langebrug 89.
24 Pharmacy of Christiaen Porrett, Maarsmansteeg.
25 Het Gulden Vercken at Vismarkt, the bakery where Rembrandt’s mother grew up.
26 The citadel (De Burcht).
27 Church of St Pancras.
28 Saaihal, the main centre of the cloth trade.
29 Faliede Bagijnhof, university library and anatomy theatre.
30 Church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk).