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In 1600s Amsterdam, two women a painter and her assistant defy the norms of their time as they take on the male-dominated art world and fall in love—from “fantastic prose writer” (Vulture) and “true master” (Guernica), Victoria Redel.
At seven years old, Gerta’s hair is lopped off and she’s sent to work for the Oosterwijcks under the name Pieter because it’s a boy they need. As Pieter, she splits wood, minds the hens and rabbits, scrubs the wooden floors of the house, and tends the garden—all while the family’s teenage daughter, Maria, looks on, sketching Pieter’s every movement. A few years later at the dinner table Maria lays Gerta’s deception open alongside a demand that Gerta accompany her to Utrecht, where Maria will apprentice in the workshop of a famous painter.
In Utrecht, Maria learns to paint skilled still lives—though she is the only woman in her workshop and because of her gender will never be accepted into the painters’ guild. As Maria ascends to great heights of skill and fame, the relationship between maid and employer deepens and shifts, and it becomes clear that Gerta, too, possesses abilities far beyond what society expects.
Inspired by the little that is known about Maria van Oosterwijck’s actual life, I Am You is a love story, a meditation on gender—the ways it binds and frees usand an ode to artistic creation. As beautifully wrought as Oosterwijck’s paintings delicate, blazing in color, and at times enveloped in shadow, Victoria Redel’s new novel brings to life the copious spoils of Amsterdam’s Golden Age, and the perils that lay hidden within them for women like Maria and Gerta.
