Colours swirl through the pages of Victoria Redel’s new novel I Am You, like paints on an easel, and so it is no surprise to find out that the author started out as a fine art student. Her book tells the imagined story of real people: the 17th-century Dutch artist Maria van Oosterwijck and her maid, Gerta. But it touches on so much more: what it is to be an artist, the way that colours are made – from minerals, plants, soot, snails, spice and more – and even the lives of the Jews who came to Amsterdam after being expelled from Portugal.
When I meet Redel she tells me that the idea for the book started 20 years ago, in New York, where she lives, when she stepped into a shop called Kremer Pigments “and I saw all these beautiful pigments in jars, and I walked out of the shop, having signed up for a weekend workshop in making paint in the style of the Renaissance paint maker”. Afterwards she knew she wanted to write a book about paint, and called it The Dye-Maker’s Daughter, but the story never developed, and she tucked the idea away to revisit one day. That day came when she spent time in Amsterdam, finishing writing a book of poetry at the Rijksmuseum’s gloriously beautiful library. There she heard of the decidedly obscure Maria van Oosterwijck. Even though she was working in one of the world’s greatest art history libraries, there was little there about Maria, and although she had been a successful artist, not one of her paintings hung in the vast museum.
“There were about seven facts about her, and two or three of them were questionable,” says Redel. But one of those facts was that Maria and her maid had lived together their entire lives, another was that neither had married, and yet another was that Gerta had been trained as an artist by Maria. It felt unusual for Maria to have remained unmarried; marriage opened doors for women artists in those days. So what might have prevented her from choosing that route? “In a novel, those questions for me, they’re like my own little engine,” says Redel. “ I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how or what will happen, but they’re the mystery I enter. The story develops from the questions I ask.”
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Redel’s story imagines the two women in love, and she skilfully examines the barriers and prejudice they face, and their urgent need for secrecy. The Jewish element of the story comes when Maria engages another maid, Diamanta, who comes from the Portuguese-Jewish community, newly arrived in the Netherlands, and newly able to practise the religion her family had needed to keep secret for generations.
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