Of Tulips and Paintings

As the title of this post suggests there's a common thread running through these three books. All three are set in the Netherlands during the 17th century and feature painters as key plot points. But there are underlying themes as well.

Probably the most renowned of the three titles is Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier (published in 1999). A fictionalized story of Vermeer's painting of the same name, Chevalier creates a backstory for the the young woman who is the subject of the painting. Because of her family's misfortune,16 year old Griet ends up working as a maid in Vermeer household. She spends enough time working around the master painter to develop an interest in art and eventually she becomes the model for one of his most famous paintings.  But her life is never her own to command and much of the novel deals with the various forces that control her destiny as some one of little or no consequence.

Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach (published 2001) also features a real-life  (if much lesser known) artist, Jan van Loos. The young woman in this novel is Sophie who is married to a man 40 years her senior and Jan van Loos is hired by her husband to paint her portrait. Like her counterpart Griet, Sophie has had little choice in how her life has played out but her meeting with Jan propels her to take control of her life and sets off a series of events and decisions that will change it forever. As the title of the book suggests, a large part of the storyline focuses on tulip mania and Moggach does a wonderful job of capturing the frenzy that surrounded the acquisition of rare varieties during that era and the resulting financial crash.

The third book in this trio is a retelling of a well known fairy tale. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (published 1999) was written by Gregory McGuire who is best known for his other fairy tale remake Wicked. Just as in Cinderella, there are 3 young women at the heart of this story, along with a 'wicked' stepmother. One of the stepsisters Iris is constantly reminded by her mother how 'ugly' she is, so rather than hope for marriage, she aspires to paint and finds a tutor willing to teach her secretly.  But just as in the other novels, all of the young women (and the stepmother) have few opportunities and even fewer choices so although some of the decisions that the characters make are truly wicked, one can't help but feel slightly sympathetic to all of them and McGuire manages to create a version of the Cinderella fable where the lines between the good and the bad are blurred.

Bonus Read- A reoccurring theme in all of the above books was the lack of options that women of 17th century Netherlands seemed to have. The choices if any were marriage or servitude and both seem remarkably similar, particularly when the option whether to marry or to whom wasn't theirs to choose either. So when I read The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith (published 2017) it was a a nice change to read about a woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age. I wish I could say that her story was a happy one but in this novel set in three time frames (NY 1958, Holland 1638 and Australia 2000) doesn't give us much more than a glimpse of Sara and far too much on the less interesting story lines. Still, it makes a good counterpart to the above trio.