Opening Sentence:All those years living across the canal from the New Maze Park, and I never did make it inside.
Synopsis:Why should I tend to a stubborn old man who cared so little about me that he tossed a secondhand name my way when I was born? Cornelia was the name of his first two daughters… Both died young, within days of their birth… After the second death, one would begin to wonder about the luck that name carries. I do.
With her mother dead of the plague and her brother moved away, Cornelia van Rijn finds herself without friend or confidant – save her difficult father. Out of favour with Amsterdam‘s elite, Rembrandt van Rijn is now teetering on the brink of madness, and Cornelia alone must care for him. But she herself is haunted by secrets and scandal, and as Cornelia yearns for a way out her vision becomes clouded to the one true happiness she may have.

I am Rembrandt’s Daughter is a powerful account, based on fact, of a young woman’s coming of age and the larger than life father who threatens to eclipse her dreams.
Genre:Literature & Fiction
Rating:@@@@
Pages:300
BCID:xxx-6276392
ISBN:978-0-7475-9199-3
Year:2008
Format:Paperback
Comments:I am Rembrandt’s Daughter is a charming book about Cornelia van Rijn, daughter of Rembrandt van Rijn. Raised by a famous painter, alive during the years of the plague and living with a strict class system, the life of this woman must have been interesting indeed. This book puts forth one woman’s thoughts of what Cornelia’s life might have been like.

Written in first person, with periodical diary excerpts, this is a lovely story that had me hooked from the beginning. The author has a light, easy-to-read style that makes this book a pleasant experience. Irrelevant to the story, but I also love the soft canvas-style cover!

Related articles

• Secret Painting in Rembrandt Masterpiece Coming into View (news.discovery.com)
• New X-Ray Technology To Reveal Secrets Beneath a Rembrandt Masterpiece (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• Rembrandt Painting’s Hidden Image May Yield To X-Ray Analysis (huffingtonpost.com)
• Background Information about Rembrandt and the Old Masters (landscapeartblog.wordpress.com)
• Mysterious Rembrandt: X-ray analysis of detailed mock-up shows how to reveal hidden paintings (phys.org)

Categories: Impressions

Tags: Amsterdam, book, fiction, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, painting, rembrandt, Rijn, University of Antwerp, X-ray fluorescence