Upside-Down World

At the age of twenty-five, Benjamin Moser settled as a young writer in an old Dutch town. He began by visiting the country's major museums now and then, but the visits soon became a compulsion that lasted decades. Inside those buildings he uncovered the lives of the painters who shaped the Dutch Golden Age.

He studied Rembrandt, whose sainted image hides a surprising darkness, and Vermeer, whose real subject is hidden in plain sight. He also came to know less famous figures: Carel Fabritius, a virtuoso whose story is marked by tragedy, Jan Lievens, a troubled prodigy, and Hendrik Avercamp, a deaf painter. Their work also reveals the country itself, from the luminous church interiors of Pieter Saenredam and the muddy farmyards of Paulus Potter to the cozy domestic scenes of Pieter de Hooch and the gnarled trees of Jacob van Ruisdael.

As Moser built a life for himself in the Netherlands, year after year, he came to regard these painters, dead for centuries, as companions. He realized they had wrestled with the same questions he was asking. Why make art? What is art, and what is an artist? What does success look like for an artist, and what does failure look like? Can art offer consolation, or is it a danger?

The Upside-Down World invites readers to ask these questions too and to view them from unexpected angles, looking closely and then looking again. It presents the Netherlands and its great painters in a new light. Illustrated with images, it is also a personal coming-of-age story and self-portrait that took about twenty years to write.