Set in seventeenth-century Holland, an engrossing historical novel that brilliantly imagines the complex story behind one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings
Commissioned by a prominent Amsterdam medical guild, The Anatomical Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was one of Rembrandt's first paintings to gain public notice. The novel opens on the morning of the medical dissection, and, as they prepare for that evening's big event, it follows several characters: a one-handed coat thief called Aris the Kid, who is awaiting his turn at the gallows; the twenty-six-year-old Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment; Jan Fetchet, a curio collector who also moonlights as an acquirer of medical cadavers; Flora, the woman pregnant with Aris's child, who hopes to collect her lover's body for a Christian burial before it's too late; RenΓ© Descartes, who attended the dissection in the course of his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and Pia, a contemporary art historian who is examining the painting in the future. As the story builds to its dramatic and inevitable conclusion, the events that transpire throughout the day sway Rembrandt to change his initial composition in a fundamental way. Bringing to life the vivid world of Amsterdam in 1632, The Anatomy Lesson offers a rich slice of history and a textured story by a masterful young writer.
NINA SIEGAL is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Jack Leggett Fellowship from Iowa, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She is the founding editor of Time Out Amsterdam and has written for The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and International Herald Tribune.
Author Residence: Amsterdam
"Brilliantly structured, wonderfully evocative, filled with vivid characters, The Anatomy Lesson transports the reader to that day in 1632 when the coat thief Aris Kindt passed from life to death and from death, thanks first to Rembrandt and now Nina Siegal, into immortality. A dazzling debut."
*-Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
"Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a narrative in paint which tells a story of Amsterdam in its Golden Age. Now, Nina Siegal's lovely novel dissects the dissection, evocatively translating the painted narrative into words, bringing a grim tableau to life and reanimating a moment in history when art, science, life, and death converged."
-*Russell Shorto, author of Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City