The Story Behind Rembrandt‘s Love Affair with His Maid

For my submission to the Young Storyteller Award 2024 I decided to revive the first short story I ever wrote. I was so captivated by the story when I came across it—a world-renowned painter who took up with a servant girl and stayed with her until their last days.

Below is an insight into my process and why I decided to put the servant girl, Hendrickje Stoffels, at the center of my story.

the historical research

Through my years of running this blog and being a history enthusiast generally, I knew how uncommon it was in the medieval age to achieve class mobility through marriage. In ages past for someone of Rembrandt‘s position, it wasn‘t normally done.

His first marriage to a wealthy noblewoman, Saskia van Uylenburgh was even more so since women of a high class were often positioned to marry above their standing. Marriage throughout the medieval period acted as a means of securing wealth for the family.

However, by the 17th century, society was beginning to change. During the Dutch Golden Age, (1588-1672), wealth was flooding into the city. The Dutch East India Company established in 1602 was bringing back gold, spices, and slaves from the East. Amsterdam became the center of this trade, providing the city with its backbone of wealth to commission artists for beautiful new buildings and masterpieces to hang inside.

It wasn‘t long before some of the centuries‘ most famous painters like Vermeer, Van der Heyden, and De Heem took up residence and began painting both secular and religious pieces.

With new wealth and art came changing social standards—beating servants became frowned upon, marriage attitudes changed to include an element of friendship between spouses, and wealth became the marker of success. In Dutch society, the nobility had relatively little influence since most of them lived out on provincial lands—not in the heart of Amsterdam. The city itself was always a sea trading hub, a place for merchants and those looking to make their fortunes.

rembrandt‘s relationships

This historical backdrop made it possible for a wealthy man like Rembrandt to choose intimate partners beneath his social class. To me, this detail made the story all the more interesting. Rembrandt is a man who values passion over marrying purely for wealth. It‘s no secret the women he took as lovers were also models in his paintings. His muses.

From the beginning, his affair with Hendrickje was fraught with obstacles. She was unwittingly in the middle of an existing relationship with a former maid of the house, Geertje Dircx. She was 16 years older than Hendrickje and had been with the household since Titus was a baby, when she was hired as a wet nurse after Saskia‘s sudden death from childbirth.

Being practically a mother figure in the household, Geertje seemed to only care about one thing—securing her position as Rembrandt‘s permanent lover.

In surviving records, Geertje was said to have outbursts when things didn‘t go her way. Even in the presence of a notary, she refused to sign certain documents to secure a more lucrative settlement for herself.

Hendrickje‘s new life

When Hendrickje is hired by the household, she‘s in the middle of a difficult time in her life. One year prior, her father died in a terrible gunpowder explosion at the Bredevoort garrison. Her brothers were fighting in the Eighty Years‘ War, which wouldn‘t end until 1648, one year after she moved to Amsterdam.

To make matters worse, her mother decided to remarry her neighbor with three children, just one year after her husband‘s death. Some sources claim that Hendrickje was forced out by her mother and told to fend for herself. Being 20 at the time, she was definitely old enough to begin working, but something told me there was a sting behind this chain of events. She had lost her father, and now her mother had forced her out and remarried quickly.

If she wasn‘t forced out, I believe Hendrickje might have wanted to start a new life far away from the countryside she grew up in. Perhaps the reminder of the explosion was too much, or maybe she needed distance from her mother‘s new life. Whatever the reason, she traveled far into Amsterdam, no doubt wanting to find her own way in life.

Through hendrickje‘s eyes

I put Hendrickje in the center of this story. To me, she seemed bold, and incredibly strong, but also quiet, cheerful, and observant. In Rembrandt‘s paintings, she always has a youthful glow, mysterious eyes, and a lighthearted manner. It feels like Rembrandt wants us to know that she‘s a layered woman. A woman who‘s sure of what she wants yet also shy and hides her emotions. At this moment in time, she‘s a young woman with not much life experience yet has lost her father and watched as her family break apart before her eyes.

Her complexity as a character is why I centered the story on her. I wanted to see what was happening from her perspective, and how she managed to navigate a household full of tension.

Dutch society was still staunchly protestant, so there were rigid laws around intimacy. Later in life, Hendrickje was excommunicated from the church for living in “whoredom” with Rembrandt. She couldn‘t throw all caution to the wind and sleep with Rembrandt without any kind of security, yet she also couldn‘t betray her heart. Everything was a balancing act.

Read the book

The book is now available to buy via print-on-demand. Get your copy here. If you‘re in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland you can get your copy at Thalia.

Want a sneak peek? Check out several of the chapters for free on Story One.