Blom Onno - Young Rembrandt

Picture postcard showing Weddesteeg, Leiden.

The committee had a modest plaque attached to the faade, but otherwise it rather pooh-poohed the house where the citys 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 faade 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 faade. 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 faade was torn down againalong 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 fathers 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. Its 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 Leidens old city centre. The upstairs apartment on Morskade where my grandparents spent their entire life together overlooked a sawmill, the Heesterboom. When the mills 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 millers son: the fact with which almost all biographies of the painter begin. The importance of these origins should not be downplayed: Rembrandts father, Harmen Gerritszoon, came from a millers 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 Harmens 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 17181721, 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 fathers 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 Rembrandts 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 birds-eye map of Leiden produced by Jacob van Deventer around 1560. In fact it stood, I swear to God, a stones throw from the place where my mother grew up and my grandparents spent their entire lives.