Ode to Elsje Christiaens | You are not an example, offer no inspiration but there is still a lesson to be learned from your life

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You will not have thought this when you breathed your last on a scaffold on Dam Square one spring day in 1664: you have become famous. You appear in many a book about Amsterdam's history. A bridge was even named after you in 2016. Which is a bit sinister, because the bridge is near the place where your dead body was displayed on the gallows field at the Volewijck. You must have seen that same Volewijck when you arrived in Amsterdam from Jutland, your native region, a few weeks earlier. Did you shudder when you saw the gallows? Or did you not notice them?

You had a short life (you lived to be only 18) and it ended horribly. You killed your landlady by hitting her six times in her head with an axe and once in her arm. You were arrested, interrogated and sentenced to death. It was probably a topic of conversation in town for a few days. A young woman who murdered her landlady is a story people love to pass on. But as it goes, at some point something else happens that is the talk of the day and you are forgotten right?

This happened to you too, yet you later became famous. It was all because a very famous painter decided to do drawings of you when you were hanging dead on the gallows field. Apparently, he also thought it was an interesting subject, a dead, young murderess? He made drawings of your dead body, which eagerly passed from owner to owner in later centuries. Those owners were not so much concerned about you, who you were or what you had done, but mostly about that artist who had made them. People even forgot who the depicted young woman actually was, until, not even that long ago, a woman, Isa van Eeghen, rediscovered who you were. And again, your story was eagerly told and you became famous. Once again, the story of a young murderess proved irresistible to people. 

Not long after she made you famous, in 1987, women protested at the same museum where your drawings are kept. They wanted women to have an equal role in stories of art and history. Their slogan, referring to all those naked goddesses, nymphs and shepherdesses seen in paintings was, ‘Do women have to take off their clothes first to get into the museum?’  If they knew your drawings they might have added ‘Do women have to be murdered first to get into history?’

What does your fame mean? Why does my time want to remember you so much? Not because of your actions, because that you were guilty, I have no doubt. Nor for the punishment because it was far too severe. In the eyes of art historians and historians, you are given an image of innocence based on your age, gender and perhaps that too harsh punishment. But more young women were put to death in Amsterdam in your time and we don't remember their stories. We remember you because you were put to death and scarred by that one a famous man. That too is too harsh a punishment.

You are no example, offer no inspiration but there is nevertheless a lesson to be drawn from your life, namely: that you can feel compassion even for a murderess in 1664. For what happened to you, and how - despite everything - you became famous.

Greetings,
Tom van der Molen