- Jessica Norman
One Hundred Self Portraits
Rembrandt painted close to
One hundred self-portraits
In pencil and ink
and oils and chalk -
Brow etched with lines
And glazed eyes
That gaze into a world
So far beyond their canvas.
Was it for Saskia,
Those lines were drawn?
No-one’s sure
Which portraits are yours -
Married for love at twenty-two
And dead by twenty-nine
But not before you bore
Four, and lost three babies -
Noblewoman to a miller’s son,
Later, he would sell your grave to pay his debts,
And yet
They named an asteroid after you:
Saskia four hundred and sixty one.
Was it for Geertje -
Young Titus’s young wet-nurse
With fire in your soul -
That burin in hand
He carved those grooves?
You fought with every fibre
For the marriage promised you
Only to be committed
by him to
Spinhuis - the asylum -
Where you deserved to be
Perhaps, for thinking
He would marry you.
For he’d already found Hendrickje -
Twenty years his junior
And former maid -
Did he impasto thick
Those folds with light and shade
For you?
Who saved him from debt
With canny business mind
And so remained his common-law wife
Until you died
Perhaps of plague in 1663.
For this no words in any language:
Saskia, Geertje, Hendrickje, all
Appendages to his success
Their legacy left
(one asteroid and)
A collection of composite images,
As he immortalised himself
One hundred times over
In his own hand.
