Chapter 41
IN THE ENTRY HALL BELOW, Frans Hals and the other men of the Guild pushed their way through the crowd to the door. They left without another glance at Judith, and she felt a chill of fear. Even Frans de Grebber left with them. A few other mourners followed, though to her surprise, the room stayed full. Paulus van Beresteyn stayed, gnawing on a peach and chatting mournfully with a trader from the docks. Carolein must have found good beer indeed, Judith thought with a small smile. She realized he had provided the funds for the painters’ scheme, but she found she could not blame him. He did not know her, and he had never pretended to welcome her into a guild. As she and Maria descended the stairs, Jan raised a hand in greeting.
“It seems you’re glad to see him,” Maria said with a soft smile. Judith blushed.
“I’m happy to see any kind faces,” Judith said. She found Jan’s gaze, and then looked down at her feet.
“Go on.” Maria nudged her at the small of her back.
Judith wove through the small crowd to where Jan stood. His face was red with heat, and he wiped a bit of sweat from his temple.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I only received the message yesterday,” he said. “I left as soon as I could, but the horse I had threw a shoe, and then . . . That’s all to say that I’m very sorry, Judith. I’m sorry Abraham has left us.”
He wrapped his warm arms around her and pressed his lips to her cheek. It was a customary greeting, and yet Judith felt herself relax into his embrace like she had never done in any other. He held her a moment longer than traditional, and then he released her to grip her slim shoulders between his hands. They were strong hands, used to grinding pigments and wielding a brush with precision. She softened against his shoulder, and her tears threatened to break through again. She pulled back. “Thank you for writing to me,” he said. “And that was brave, what you did now. You know I’ll support you. Always.”
“Of course.” She couldn’t muster any more, and her voice quivered with emotion. She laid her hand over his upon her shoulder, then stepped away. There was no rush. She would speak to him again, soon. It didn’t need to be now.
She found her way back to her chair by the wall, alongside Maria, though they said nothing else. That seemed right. She knew their wounds would take time, but she was relieved to hope they would heal. She watched as her brother’s friends and neighbors drank themselves to laughter and tears. Paulus van Beresteyn filled cup after cup of beer, until he wept on the shoulder of a spice merchant. “I’m ruined,” Judith heard him say, through the crowd.
She stood and walked over to him.
“Thank you for Abraham’s wages,” she said. “That was generous.”
He ran a finger around the pewter edge of his tankard. “He was a better man than I.”
“You’re kind.” Her throat caught, and she had to take a deep breath.
“The artists were wrong to think they could restrict talented artists from painting,” he said. “I’m glad to see their scheme ended, and I’m sorry I took any part in it. It seemed like a good investment.” Paulus kept his gaze upon his hand.
“I knew the Frenchman a little,” she said. “He was kinder than I expected.”
Paulus shook his head and drained the tankard. “As was Gerard. It’s all over. Now, I’m going to avail myself of another drink. My condolences again.”
Judith raised a hand to stop him but let him go. He was right, there was nothing more to say. The men were gone, and whether Lachine had meant to murder Gerard or accidentally gave him a mortal injury didn’t matter to either man now. She returned to her seat, where Maria was speaking quietly to a neighbor. Judith closed her eyes and tried to remember Lachine’s face. One day, she would have to find those urchins of his. She could pay them to model.
The gathering lasted until before nightfall, by which point the final drop had been drained from the barrels, and the mourners had shuffled home. Jan and Maria stayed until the last guests stumbled out the still-open door, and then the three of them helped Carolein and the boys with the cleaning. Judith swept a broom across the wooden floor, while Carolein and Maria took turns scrubbing out the tankards and cups they had borrowed from the neighbors. Jan and the boys replaced the tables and benches.
Finally, the household grew still. Jan collapsed next to Judith on a bench in the kitchen, and he squeezed her hand. A warm shiver ran up her elbow.
“I’ll talk to my father about the oil,” Maria said as she dried a tankard and set it on a sideboard. She rested her hand upon it and seemed to hesitate. “Judith. I should have told you this earlier, but I was so angry, and then Abraham . . . I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Before the fire, one of the men at the leper house showed me the attic there. Paulus van Beresteyn was storing dozens upon dozens of casks of linseed oil in his attic.”
Judith blinked and, in spite of her fatigue, sat up straighter upon the bench. She glanced at Jan, who looked equally surprised. Maria kept her gaze on her rag.
“You knew? And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t, Judith. My friend there made me vow not to tell, and I thought to use oil for my healing. The fire happened just after I learned.” She wrung the rag between her hands.
“Did Abraham know?” Judith held her breath. She wanted to hear Maria’s answer, and yet she wasn’t sure she could bear it.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know what to say.” She covered her mouth with her hand and glanced back and forth between her friends.
Jan pressed his lips together, and a worried line creased between his eyebrows. He said nothing. Maria exhaled loudly.
“It wouldn′t have made a difference, Judith. And I had promised the leper . . .”
Judith held still for a moment. It hurt to learn that Maria hadn’t told her. That her friend could know something so important to her and keep it a secret, even if there was nothing they could have done. Judith pinched the bridge of her nose. Yet she could see how, perhaps, she had deserved to be left in ignorance. Or at least how keeping a vow to a friend was honorable.
“The oil is all gone now. None of us can use it for anything,” Judith said.
“I know. I think, maybe, that God was punishing all of us for wanting it so badly. The painters, the magistrate, me. We all thought we could control something. But why should Abraham pay?” Maria’s voice quivered.
Judith leaned her head back against the wall, and she closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t think of Abraham being punished for anything. He already paid his debts.”
“Maria, you didn’t happen to see a leak in those casks, did you?” Jan asked.
Maria pursed her lips together. “There were some soaked rags upon the floor.”
He shook his head. “The oil catches fire easily. The smallest thing, even the hidden sparks from this awful heat we’ve been having, might set it off. That could be what started the fire.”
Maria gasped. “Then I should have told someone. Right away. I could have stopped it.”
Judith shook her head. She was too tired to feel anything but the deep grief that lapped at the hole in her chest. “You didn’t put the oil there, Maria. Don’t blame yourself for this too.” Perhaps someday she might feel angry—but not now. Abraham was gone, and nothing would change that. No matter how much she wished otherwise.
Jan nodded. “It’s a good thing that you learned of it at all, Maria. That will help us make our case to the other painters. If we need to. I suspect that if all the oil has gone up in flames, the Guild leaders will have trouble finding the money to buy up more. In a few months, we should get back to normal.”
“Whatever normal is,” Judith said softly. There had been too much loss and pain for her to go back to anything. Her tears welled up again.
“That was thoughtless of me,” Jan said and shook his head in disgust. “Forgive me.”
His eyes were wide in pleading.
He had forgotten for a moment about Abraham. His death and her pain had faded behind Jan’s concern about his workshop. Judith knew how easy it was to let one’s own worries blind.
“I know what you meant,” she said. “And you’re right. Our livelihoods depend on that oil.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks. She glimpsed a smear of ash upon the back of her hand, but when she looked again, she saw nothing but her glistening skin.
Jan, sitting next to her, put both hands on her shoulders.
“Judith, I’m so sorry. Sorry for Abraham’s loss and for you. For my idiot words. I hope you’ll give me the chance, someday, to prove that my heart thinks of more than my livelihood,” he said. Then, before she could respond, he stood. “Maria, I won’t let you walk home alone. I brought a lantern, but we shouldn’t wait too long.”
Maria nodded and dried her hands on her skirt. “Thank you, Judith.” She bent down and gave Judith a kiss on the cheek. Judith could feel a lingering hesitation in the gesture.
Maria followed Jan out the kitchen door into the entry hall. Judith was too tired to follow them, but she listened as Jan used a flint to strike a flame for his lantern. She heard the tin lid of the lantern settle over the cylinder, and she could imagine the light falling through the punched holes of the body. The front door closed heavily behind them.
Judith stood and bid Carolein good night. When she walked out into the darkened main entry hall, a flash of reflected moonlight on the floor caught her eye. She walked closer and bent down. It was a small pool of thick linseed oil, missed in the cleanup. She dipped a finger in it and lifted it to her nose. The rich scent rode her breath down into her body, and it was as though Abraham were whispering in her ear. Like he did the day of the fire, when he embraced her and refused to stop trying to rescue the lepers. “But I love them,” he had said.
Judith walked quietly up to her workshop, where she gathered a knife, a palette, and a stoppered jar. She tucked a brush behind her ear. Then downstairs, in the near dark, she scraped what remained of the oil onto her palette. She unstoppered her jar and tapped some ground ochre onto the oil and used her knife to blend it as best she could. The paint would be too dirty to use properly, but that didn’t matter.
In her bare feet she stepped out the front door and paused on the threshold. In the dark, the customary green of her front door turned black, as if it had swallowed its own color. She gave the paint another stir then began guiding her brush along the door, a hands breadth above the handle. She worked for a few minutes, laboring more by habit and instinct than sight. Every so often, a tear welled up and fell down her cheek. She let them.
When she finished, she cocked her head and tried to make out the small design. The flash of wet paint suggested a few lines. On the right sparkled a small star. She gave a slight smile and used the back of her hand to wipe away another tear. Her monogram now marked the building as her own. She dabbed a bit more paint onto her brush and added a flourish to the looping J. Judith of the leading star lives here, she thought. No, she paints here.
Epilogue
MARCH 1643, AMSTERDAM
JUDITH SAT AT A TABLE and guided her brush down the vellum. The carmine lit up the curve of the tulip’s petal, and she smiled. She had done little painting in the past few years, and she was relieved to see her skill unfurl from her hands again. She wished Abraham, now ten years dead, could see what his sister was still capable of. He had once asked her if she could paint a tulip, and she never had a chance to show him.
The tulip, a watercolor of a single plant, was for a collector who wanted a book to catalogue his precious specimens. Judith would execute two of them. It was the perfect work for her now. She bent down from the table and gave the cradle a nudge. Inside, the baby grunted and slept on, her rosebud mouth parted slightly.
Six years had passed since the crash of the tulip market, and six years had seen the births and deaths of her two sweet boys. Their absence was a sickness that she could only hold at bay, never conquer. But little Helena, who nursed with her fists curled tight against Judith’s breast, helped. The girl seemed fierce and determined to live. Judith prayed she would.
Jan was painting in the workshop, but she would show him the tulip when he came to eat. She had painted with him some, rendering the dead coloring or the fine textures of fabrics, but she had mostly occupied herself with the record keeping and business side of things, which she had learned over seven years of marriage that she did better than her husband. Between the log books, the pregnancies, the babies, and the sadness, she had little time for painting. Or, really, little heart left over. But the release now, the rising confidence that swelled up from her fingertips, was a joy. She smiled and rocked the cradle again. She was anxious to finish and sign the piece with her starred monogram.
She had seen Maria only a few times since she and Jan had moved to bustling Amsterdam shortly after their marriage. But they had nurtured their friendship through a regular correspondence. Sometimes Judith struggled to find anything more than her daily business to report, but she knew Maria understood. Maria, for her part, had given up painting entirely. It was too painful, she wrote, something Judith understood, a little. Now Maria was about to marry a potter from Utrecht, Wouter Coenraetsz de Wolff. Judith feared that the marriage would take Maria even farther away, but she knew, no matter what happened, that she would see her again.
The light softened, and Judith glanced up. A silent spring rain had started. She hoped Carolein, who had moved with them, had taken in the wash.
Helena gurgled in her cradle and blinked her large, peat-colored eyes open. Judith smiled and gave the cradle another nudge. Only a few more minutes’ delay, she silently promised the baby. She needed to paint a little longer.
Historical Note
JUDITH LEYSTER WAS BORN IN Haarlem in 1609, and she became the only woman to attain master status and operate her own workshop in the city at that time. Even as a teenaged apprentice, her work caught the attention of a local chronicler of the art scene, Samuel Ampzing, who praised her “good, keen sense.” She likely spent at least part of her apprenticeship in Frans de Grebber’s workshop, but the limited contemporary documentation on her life makes it difficult to know much about her training and career. She did petition the St. Luke’s Guild with a complaint about an apprentice abandoning her workshop for that of Frans Hals after only two days. Other than that, the documentary trail of her artistic career is faint.
The trail was so scarce that only years after Judith’s death in 1660, collectors began attributing her few surviving paintings to other artists. She signed her work with only a beautiful, stylized monogram, and once she vanished, credit for her paintings went to Frans Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer, and others. It was only in 1893 when Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, while investigating a monogrammed painting attributed to Frans Hals, rediscovered Judith (and in doing so, reduced the price of the painting by more than a fifth). Over the next century, scholarship and recognition of Judith’s work slowly gained momentum.
I first learned of Judith from a 2009 National Gallery of Art exhibition celebrating the 400-year anniversary of her birth. The self-assured young woman gazing out from her own portrait floored me. I wondered how Judith had managed to find a place for herself in a world that we think of as dominated by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and, later, Johannes Vermeer.
A Light of Her Own is a work of fiction, and I have taken some historical liberties, more than I can list here. Samuel Ampzing was both married and dead by 1633, and may his spirit forgive me the creative license I’ve taken. Judith’s lawsuit against the family of Willem Woutersz, her pupil, was not the same year she gained entry into St. Luke’s Guild but rather in 1635. She was the eighth of nine children born to Jan Willemsz and Trijn Jaspers, who later changed their name to “Leyster” or “leading star,” likely in reference to the North Star. Abraham was the youngest child. For simplicity, I left Judith’s elder siblings out of the story. Her parents did flee their Haarlem creditors in 16
28, and they very likely did not return to the city. As I hinted, Judith married Jan Miense Molenaer in 1636, and the young couple may have already faced financial difficulties from Jan’s assumption of his recently deceased father’s debts. Money worries appear to have periodically dogged Jan and Judith the rest of their lives, though they also had sufficient prosperity to purchase property, including a country house. Judith’s astute business management probably facilitated what success they had, and Jan’s paintings were popular and likely sold well. Together they had five children, though only two outlived Judith, and only Helena survived to marry and have children of her own.
Today, Judith’s self-portrait is part of the permanent collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It hangs a few rooms away from a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer. I like to think they would be happy to be so close still. The one extant painting by Maria de Grebber belongs to the Museum Catharijne convent in Utrecht. I invented her friendship with Judith, and yet I suspect it is not much of a stretch. Judith likely studied in Frans de Grebber’s workshop— quite possibly because he had a daughter a few years older who also painted, as we know from Samuel Ampzing’s account. With so few women who shared her skill and interests, Judith may well have found a kindred spirit in Maria de Grebber. May we all find the same.
Acknowledgments
IENVISION MY WRITING JOURNEY PERHAPS as Judith might—a dark path lit by the flames of those who have loved and helped me along the way. I could not have found my way here, to this book, without their help.
My dedicated and insightful agent Shannon Hassan both shaped this book and found it a home. Her faith in our beloved Judith has meant so much to me, and I couldn’t have had a better champion.
I’m deeply grateful to Dayna Anderson and Kayla Church for inviting me into the Amberjack family, where Cassandra Farrin and Cherrita Lee kept me and my words in line.
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