Struggling for Artistic Identity
With stunningly poetic prose and a deeply researched fascination with 17th-century paint-making, poet Victoria Redel has crafted a finely observed historical novel in I Am You (Zando, $28). Inspired by two real artists of the Dutch Golden Age, Maria van Oosterwijk and her servant- turned-collaborator Geertje (Gerta) Pieters Wyntges, the plot follows sensitive, perceptive Gerta, who has been sent into a wealthy household disguised as a boy. There, the daughter Maria spends her days drawing everything around her and most especially Gerta, observing her so closely that she eventually uncovers the girl’s secret.
When Maria moves to Amsterdam to build a professional studio and establish herself as a painter for hire, she brings Gerta with her. She continues to call Gerta Pieter but insists she wear girl’s clothing and resume life as a girl. “How could I erase all I’d known as a boy?” Pieter, nee Gerta, muses. “Why would I? How much more useful to have known the world both male and female, to traverse bravely with the rude mind of a boy or angle delicately with a girl’s careful polish.”
What begins as domestic servitude evolves into something far more consequential: Gerta becomes indispensable to Maria’s artistic practice. Her skill in mixing, preparing, and procuring pigments is exceptional. Some of the novel’s most absorbing passages detail the alchemy of paint; its origins, its dangers, and its secret channels of trade.
Redel writes: “To love color is to love decay. The deep black of burnt willow; the soft black of gall ink when, in spring, the wasp punctures nuts to lay her precious eggs and the oak tries to heal itself over its wounds. To love red is to love the husk of bugs. Bone of animal, bone of insect, of tree, bone of men.”
As Gerta begins to paint, Maria encourages her—at first. But a chance encounter with a Rembrandt painting in a collector’s house awakens in Gerta a longing for a new way of seeing, beyond the polished still life paintings that made her mistress famous. The relationship between the two women grows increasingly complex: student and teacher, mistress and servant, lovers and rivals. Gerta must navigate the shifting boundaries between devotion and ambition, art and labor, freedom and obligation.
I Am You ultimately offers a piercing portrait of two women struggling for artistic identity in a time when female painters were considered anachronisms. It is not always a flattering portrait. Maria’s early kindness gives way to the distortions of class, ego, and possessiveness, and Gerta’s fight for her own artistic life becomes the emotional core of the novel. Redel has written a deeply sensual, meticulously crafted story about creation, desire, and the costs of claiming a life in art.
Bethany Ball is the author of “The Pessimists” and “What to Do About the Solomons,” both published by Grove Atlantic.
