During the seventeenth century, the Guilds of St. Luke in the Netherlands controlled all aspects of professional artistic life, including who could sign and date paintings. Guild members included the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and Jan van Goyen. The historical record suggests that as many as twenty-five women were members of the guilds during the seventeenth century. But only a small handful of those artists produced work that has survived or been correctly attributed. For more than a century, the paintings of Judith Leyster were attributed to Frans Hals.
One gap in the historical record concerns Sarah van Baalbergen, the first woman to be admitted to the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. She gained entry in 1631, two years before Judith Leyster. None of Van Baalbergen’s work has survived.
Although this is a work of fiction, the novel uses such historical gaps as a springboard for invention. For the sake of storytelling, it fuses biographical details from several women’s lives of the Dutch Golden Age.