Van Rijn

Through two perspectives - from Van Rijn Rembrandt's diary and the accounts of the young editor Pieter Blaeu - Sarah Emily Miano narrates a love story that begins as Blaeu and his beloved try to understand the mysterious painter Van Rijn, with his creative routine, his manias and, mainly, his relationship with art.

Pieter Blaeu, a young publisher, encounters the elderly and forlorn painter Rembrandt Van Rijn while visiting artists' studios and is soon drawn into his life through a strange mixture of admiration and repulsion. As Pieter delves into the genius's shadowy world, he encounters a colorful cast of characters, both living and dead: relatives, friends, servants, and patrons of the painter, whose stories are sometimes obscene and humorous, and at others, philosophical and macabre. Meanwhile, Rembrandt keeps a personal diary, a small, black-covered book with dog-eared pages, where he records everything from his rules about art and life to his plays and recipes—or what he calls "the whims of my restless mind."
When Pieter meets a poet named Clara, whose interest in Rembrandt matches his, a love story begins as they try to unveil and understand the great man - from his rise to fame and wealth to his decline in popularity and poverty... It is no coincidence that he was the great master in the art of revealing and concealing.