Bailey Anthony - Rembrandts house : exploring the world of the great master

Anthony Bailey is a writer and art historian. Many years on the staff of The New Yorker , he is the bestselling author of Standing in the Sun: A Life of J. M. W. Turner , shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Vermeer: A View of Delft , shortlisted for the Whitbread biography prize; and many other books, including biographies of Constable and Velzquez.

By the same author

FICTION

Making Progress

The Mother Tongue

Major Andr

NON-FICTION

The Inside Passage

Through the Great City

The Thousand Dollar Yacht

The Light in Holland

In the Village

A Concise History of the Low Countries

Rembrandts House

Acts of Union

Along the Edge of the Forest

Spring Jaunts

The Outer Banks

A Walk Through Wales

The Coast of Summer

Responses to Rembrandt

Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.W. Turner

A View of Delft: Vermeer Then & Now

John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own

Velzquez and the Surrender of Breda

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

America, Lost & Found

England, First & Last

An engaging introduction.

Simon Schama

An affectionate meditation on the mood, the texture and the circumstances of the painters life and times. Bailey skillfully mingles his own impressions of Amsterdam today with the subjects. [He] moves, as Rembrandt did himself, from the tangible to the intangible, the material to the spiritual, the personal to the social. It is an appropriate way to look at an artist who immortalized his time and place.

The New York Times

Bailey has woven together a delightful image of Rembrandts Amsterdam, of the people he knew, the houses he lived in, the streets he walked. It is an excellent book, easy to read, and filled with fascinating information about Rembrandt and his world.

Washington Post

This is a book about Rembrandt, but about Rembrandt in Amsterdam, and it tells us the history of that city without losing track of the artistmodest, rich and sensitive. This is a book to read at many levels; no one should visit Holland again without it in his bag. It is a labour of love.

The Irish Times

Bailey manages masses of detail, from established fact to whimsical lore, with impressive skill. It would not be so absorbing, nor so evocative, if it did not return again and again to the sensuous terms of Rembrandts world. A literary triumph. It sets the standard for efforts to evoke the human reality of an artist of the past.

Kenneth Baker, Boston Phoenix

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New paperback edition published in 2014 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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First published in 1978 by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA, and J. M. Dent, London

Copyright Anthony Bailey 1978, 2014

Cover image: Self-Portrait While Drawing , 1648 (etching) (b/w photo), Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (160669) / Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse du Petit-Palais, France / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images.

The right of Anthony Bailey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 9781780769240

eISBN: 9780857737830

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

This edition is dedicated

To the Memory of John Updike, 19322009

IAM GRATEFUL to many people who helped me in the course of writing this book. They include Stewart Richardson, Hans Koning, Mr. and Mrs. Ton Koot, Gerda Rubinstein, Renate Rubinstein, Peter Vos, Professor Charles Wilson, Professor Jan van Wessem, Bob Haak, Professor Dr. Arie Querido, Ir. R. Meischke, Geurt Brinkgreve, Dick Baas Bekking, Gay van der Meer, S. A. C. Dudok van Heel, Margaret Clouston, Professor Dr. R. W. Scheller, Peter Schatborn, Mr. and Mrs. Jon Swan, Nigel Konstam, Dr. Alice Clare Carter, J. A. van Alphen, Michiel Jonker, Dr. Katharine Fremantle, Eva Ornstein-van Slooten, P. van Oordt, Benno Groeneveld, C. J. Fox, Cecile van Oosterwijk, Frances L. Apt, Robert Cowley, and, most particularly, Margot Bailey.

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connections but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.

Henry James: Preface to The Aspern Papers

Besides, this country inspires me. I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea steaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

Albert Camus: The Fall

IAM SITTING in the little room that forms the entire ground floor of the back extension of a house in Amsterdam. I have this room for a month. It is, in fact, not on the ground but a few feet above it, with three wooden steps leading up to it from the small courtyard at the rear of the house. The door is made of four vertical planks and three crosspieces holding it together, with the scribbles of an eighteenth-century carpenter just visible on it (upside down, for the door was turned head to tail when it was rehung at some point). Two casement windows, each with twelve panes of glass, some white, some slightly greenish, are set high in the wall. I can look out through them on the courtyard, which is little more than a well among the surrounding buildings. This house was built in 1685 and fronts a canal, with a roadway along each bank, known as the Oude Zijds Voorburgwal. The houses at the back of the courtyard face the Oude Zijds Achterburgwal. The names describe the position of the canals on either side, back and front, of the medieval city wall, an earthen rampart long ago beaten down to form a site for houses. The inner walls of my room are of rough white plaster interrupted by massive woodwork: oak sills, exposed beams and uprights, all painted a glossy reddish-brown. The furniture is simple: bed spanning the width of the room, straw mat, lamp, chair, and table under the window.