This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Verity Wilde
Hendrickje’s left her strict Calvinist family in the provinces and found work as a housemaid to Rembrandt. Its five years since his wife died and he hasn’t recovered from his grief. When she witnesses a sexual encounter between the artist and his housekeeper Hendrickje is shocked to her core, but slowly she’s drawn in by the artist and his world view as she watches him and his apprentices at work.
I really didn’t know much about Rembrandt before I read this book – beyond the obvious, that he was Dutch, an artist and painted a lot of self-portraits. His love life, as fictionalised in Rembrandt’s Mirror, makes a compelling and warm story, even though his life was not always happy or easy. As befits a book about an artist who painted masterpieces, there are beautiful passages of description in this book, which conjured vivid pictures as I read. I found myself googling some of the paintings referenced as I read because they are such an important feature of the story. This did interrupt the flow of the book slightly for me, but this wouldn’t be a problem for the non-heathens who know more about Rembrandt than I do!
I read a lot of historical novels, although I tend to favour things set in the eighteenth century or later as I find the characters easier to relate to. Reading this has made me question my decision to avoid earlier periods, because this is an excellent example of how to make people who lived in a time with a different world view sympathetic and compelling.
I don’t have the level of scholarship necessary to pass judgement on this book’s historical accuracy, but I thought Rembrandt’s Mirror was a fascinating and intimate portrait of the artist and his household which is a feast for the imagination, but one which needed a little background research to get the most out of it.7/10