Ode to Catharina Backer | Ode to Catharina Backer

This text was translated using AI and may contain errors. If you have suggestions or comments, please contact us at info.ode@amsterdammuseum.nl.

Are you okay with me addressing you this way? It sounds so much better than the official Catherine and well, it is the name your father and mother used and this letter is mostly about the time when you were a girl, a young woman and living at home.

You knew very early on what you wanted to be: an artist. Your father collected art and artists regularly visited your home on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. Becoming an artist meant a lot of practice, you understood that. But there was no art school in Amsterdam; there were artists who gave drawing lessons, but as a girl, as a woman, you were not allowed to go there. So you had to teach yourself. And you practiced, you made hundreds of drawings. There were plenty of examples in your father's collection: drawings, prints, paintings and small statues and reliefs of biblical and mythological figures. So you could learn how to paint figures, including nudes, because drawing from nude models, which men did, was of course out of the question for you. You probably also had one of those drawing books that contained all kinds of exercises for drawing faces and hands, feet and perspective.

Looking at your drawings, I think you actually wanted to become a history painter. That was ambitious, because history painting, painting biblical and mythological stories, allegories, that was the most difficult thing, you knew that, of course. Not only did you have to be good at painting but you also had to make up the stories, and come up with the staging.

Just look at the fan blade you painted, surely you had everything you needed to become a good history painter! The staging with that classical architecture and those stairs going down the fan blade to the left and right! So well done! And then the performance itself, so beautifully thought out. A painteress (were you thinking of yourself?) walks to a throne on which sits Pictura, the Painting. She is accompanied by Time (after all, Painting conquers Time) and by the goddess Minerva, the goddess of Art and Amor who carries the torch of inspiration. And then left and right those cozy, chubby little children busy drawing and admiring a sculpture.

Was Willem van Mieris your great role model, who had painted portraits of your parents and also befriended them? He also painted history paintings in a small format and loved those chubby little children.

And then the big question. What made you decide to eventually become a painter of floral still lifes? Did you meet Anna Ruysch, also a flower painter, who had a painter's store on the Damrak with her husband, or her sister Rachel Ruysch, the most successful flower painter in Amsterdam? Did you go to the Hortus in the Plantage to draw flowers and meet other draughtswomen there, such as Alida Withoos, from a family of painters, and Maria Monnickx who worked with her father on an album of hundreds of plants in the Hortus? At your country estate on the Vecht, Voortwijk, were there plants you could draw? Or at Gunterstein, diagonally across from you on the Vecht, where Magdalena Poulle had created such a beautiful garden, even with greenhouses? Hundreds of drawings of flowers you must have made to put them all together in your still lifes.

You were working at full speed, you were just twenty and by then you had already made not only a lot of drawings of flowers but also at least eight paintings.

But: your life took a different turn. Even as a small child you had agreed with your cousin Allard (de la Court) that when you grew up you would marry each other, he also loved drawing. And then the time came, you were 21 and he 23. And there you went to Leiden, living in the big house of the De la Court family on the Rapenburg. You took your drawings and your paintings with you. Allard was an important man in Leiden, he was busy with his work and weighty visitors walked in and out. You had to run the household, you had children. And how unhappy you were, lonely in that big house, far - a day's journey away - from the cozy family in Amsterdam. There was no more painting. To paint you need time, rest and inspiration, and you had none of those.

Dear Catie, what a successful painter you would have been. It's so sad, so much talent broken in bud. For a moment you thought it was also destined for you: a painting career. But fate, your life's journey, decided otherwise.

Yet you are still a shining example to us women (and men?), because as a young girl you pursued your dreams with such unparalleled drive and success.

Dear Catie, we enjoy your works of art and honor your memory.

Much love,