Rembrandt_Elsje Christiaens

♦ Christiaens, Elsje ♦
(born in Jutland around 1646 – died in Amsterdam around May 1, 1664), servant, sentenced to death for murdering her landlady.

Around April 14, 1664, Elsje Christiaens, an 18-year-old from Sprouwen (possibly the island of Sprogo) in Jutland, arrived in Amsterdam. She hoped to find work as a maid and rented a room from a woman who provided lodging. At the end of that same month, the landlady wanted a daalder for lodging, which she could not pay. The landlady then threatened to confiscate her chest of belongings.
When they argued about this, the woman hit her with a broomstick. Elsje then grabbed an axe and struck the landlady, who fell down the cellar stairs and lay there, dead. Elsje Christaens then fled from the neighbors who had come to investigate the commotion and jumped into the Damrak canal. She was fished out and arrested.

She was interrogated twice, and on May 1, 1664, the sentence was handed down: death by strangulation on the stake, several blows to the head with the murder weapon by the executioner, and display of the body with the axe above her head in the Volewijk neighborhood to be consumed by the air and the birds. On that same day, May 1, or a few days later, the sentence was carried out.

♦ Volewijk
The history of the gallows field at Volewijk dates back to 1360, when this place was already used to display the bodies of executed criminals. The latter was an additional punishment on top of the execution.
Denying a decent burial meant that the executed person would not take part in the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, a biblical concept that no one doubted.

Volewijk in Noord was ideally located to maximize its effect: ships entering the port of Amsterdam passed by it, and the dangling corpses were clearly visible from the city.
Galgenstraat on Prinseneiland is named after this view; as soon as they stepped outside their doors, the residents of that street were confronted with the sight of decomposing corpses in the distance. It was an unsubtle but effective way of making it clear to the people what would happen if they did not obey the rules.

♦ Tourist attraction
However, it did not only serve as a deterrent. Just like the public executions on Dam Square, the gallows field was highly entertaining for the people of Amsterdam. It was a favorite place for a day out for the whole family, and there were even food and drink stalls so that no one went hungry.

Late medieval Amsterdammers were used to a smelly city with foul-smelling canals, so eating a sandwich among rotting corpses was no problem.

♦ Children's tree
The gallows field was not only a place of death, but also of new life. Curious Amsterdam children were kept quiet with the story that there was a tree near the gallows pit where babies came from. This children's tree only bloomed at night, and then it was important for the man and woman in love to row a boat to the gallows field to pick children.
In ‘Het nieuwe Princesse Liedt-Boeck’ (The New Princess Songbook) from 1682, it appears as follows:

De Amsterdamse Voolwijcks-Schuyt
Weet ghy niet wat dat die beduyt?
De Schuyt, of Kraeck-wage, is een
De Volewijck, en Put, gemeen,
Omtrent by die Knie-galgh staet
Daer Buer-vroutjens dan Roeyen gaet
Al aen den Put, tot sy gewis
Een Zoon of Dochter vinden, fris.

The story of the Kinderboom was passed down from generation to generation to children in Amsterdam for centuries, until the stork made its appearance.
De Kinderboom primary school in Noord is named after this old folk tale.

♦ Rembrandt
In the late summer of 2001, a piece of paper measuring 17 by 9 centimeters traveled from New York to London. The fragile sheet was treated with the utmost care and gentleness during its journey across the ocean.
Three centuries earlier, in May 1664, the paper had been transported by boat across the IJ river to the Volewijck neighborhood in Amsterdam-Noord. There, the 57-year-old Rembrandt van Rijn had used it to make a drawing of Elsje Christiaens, who was almost forty years his junior. She was hanging there from a pole so that birds could feast on her body. Earlier that day, she had been executed on Dam Square, guilty of murdering her landlady, whose head she had smashed with an axe.

In the drawing—the axe also hangs on the gallows, next to the head of the condemned woman—Elsje Christiaens appears even younger than she was in reality. Rembrandt drew the dead woman with a flawless face and the expression of a sleeping child. The drawing has been in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, since 1929, as has a second sketch of the dead Elsje.

The story of the gruesome death of Elsje Christiaens owes its fame to the archival research conducted by Amsterdam archivist Miss I.H. van Eeghen in response to two drawings by Rembrandt. These depict a convicted woman with an axe above her head, tied to a stake at the Amsterdam gallows field Volewijk.
Based on the drawing technique, Rembrandt experts dated the drawings to around 1655. Van Eeghen was annoyed that they did not bother to search for the facts in the court archives.

She went through 25 years of confession books and discovered that the only woman sentenced to death who fit the description must have been the Danish maid Elsje Christiaens. Based on this finding, she was able to date the drawings precisely to early May 1664. Van Eeghen triumphantly concluded that Rembrandt experts had been wrong by eight to ten years. She therefore expressed the hope that ‘Elsje Christiaens, who once served as an example to deter others from committing crimes, will now serve as an example once again, this time for art historians to be cautious when dating works on the basis of stylistic criteria! (Van Eeghen, 78).

Nevertheless, some art historians continue to struggle with this. In Rembrandt’s Women (2004), Lloyd Williams argues that, based on style, the drawings should actually be dated earlier. Rembrandt only used such fine, somewhat scratchy parallel lines in the 1650s: ‘Intriguingly, it is only the link to Else Christiaens’s execution in 1664 which provides such a late date for both drawings’ (Williams, 239).

Rembrandt_Elsje Christiaens

References

Art lijst

Schilderijen

Schilderijen en de dokter

Schilders

Historie lijst

Wetenswaardigheden lijst