BookBrowse Reviews I Am You by Victoria Redel

BookBrowse:

Victoria Redel fictionalizes the largely undocumented life of seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age painter Maria van Oosterwijck in this bold and unsparing historical novel, told through the eyes of Maria's assistant, Gerta Pieters.

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Little is known about the Dutch Golden Age painter Maria van Oosterwijck, famous for her floral still life paintings. It is known that Maria began her career in Delft, a town in the modern-day Netherlands, before relocating to Utrecht and finally Amsterdam, where she enjoyed a prosperous career and ran her own studio. It is also known that she taught her servant, Gerta Pieters, how to mix her paints, and trained her as a painter. It is this story that captures Victoria Redel's imagination as she fictionalizes the life of Maria in I Am You, which is narrated by Gerta and focuses on the complex relationship between the two women.

Gerta's story begins as a child when she is sent to Maria's family's home as a servant. As the Oosterwijck family has no need for female servants, Gerta's mother disguises her as a boy who goes by the name of Pieter. Maria, seven years Gerta's senior and already a fledgling painter, becomes fixated on sketching and painting Gerta as she performs tasks around the house. It is not until Maria makes plans to depart to Utrecht to apprentice under the still life master Jan Davidszoon de Heem that she reveals to Gerta that she's known all along about her gender, and insists that Gerta throw away her trousers and accompany her to Utrecht as her lady's maid.

Gerta, whom Maria calls Pieter throughout the novel, is all too willing to do Maria's bidding. Fascinated with her beautiful mistress since her childhood, Gerta takes it upon herself to learn how to mix the finest paints, and when the two relocate to Amsterdam where Maria opens her own studio, Gerta quickly finds the best apothecary in the city to source her paint materials. As Maria rises in the ranks in Amsterdam society, gaining commissions from notable patrons both local and abroad, and as her relationship with Gerta turns romantic, Gerta finds herself eager to feel even closer to Maria. In the dead of night, while Maria sleeps, Gerta teaches herself how to paint by studying Maria's still lifes.

As Gerta's skill develops, slowly but surely, and Maria's craft hits a plateau, the relationship between mistress and servant, between teacher and pupil, becomes muddied. Gerta, who has spent her entire life in service to Maria, begins to wonder about her own identity and future. She begins to realize that living in domestic harmony with Maria, hiding their relationship, hiding her own artistic prowess, is a tenuous arrangement, but as it's all she knows, she remains in the shadows of Maria's success, until things come to a head in an explosive conclusion.

Victoria Redel excels at evoking the atmosphere of the Dutch Golden Age—descriptions of Amsterdam are vivid and full of life, and Redel's lush, descriptive writing lends itself well to passages about painting and mixing dyes. It feels as if the reader is right there with Gerta, peering over Maria's shoulder as she works. The two central characters—both complex, contradictory, headstrong yet vulnerable—are the book's other strength. Gerta's relationship with her gender is one of the more compelling central themes, as throughout the book she will at times don her Pieter clothes and readopt her male persona in order to get something she needs, marveling both at the freedom it affords her and the danger that it puts her in. Through Gerta's character Redel explores the concept of gender as performance, and through Maria's character she further explores the constraints placed on women at the time, particularly the limitations faced by female artists compared to their male counterparts.

I Am You is a gorgeous and vivid historical novel about art and sex and ambition, but it's also, above all else, a brilliant exploration of the ways in which personal and interpersonal identities become intertwined, and how challenging it can be to wholly love another person without losing yourself.

This review first ran in the October 8, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.