Ode to Isabella Henriette van Eeghen | Curious about just everything

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Dear Miss Van Eeghen,  

Madam, that is not how you wished to be called. Madam assumed a gentleman, and there had never been one, you told Adriaan van Dis when you were a guest on his television programme in 1988. It was a dry observation rather than a feminist statement.  

The fact that you never married was a practical matter for you: you couldn't think of stopping working, and you would have been forced to do so as a married woman at the time. When the Legal Incapacity Act was abolished, in 1956, you were forty-three. An age like a judgement - or like a liberation. You lived in a house on Prinsengracht with several other single ladies, and I read somewhere that you ate most evenings at home, at your parents' house, who also lived on one of the canals (I forget which one). Wealthy patrician family, et cetera, though you were brought up with a great sense of thrift (‘thrifty Baptists’ you called your parents and ancestors) and, following an older sister who failed at lyceum and because of your difficulty in spelling, a careless underestimation of your intellectual abilities. 

You fought against the latter, by passing the state grammar school exam on your own after high school for girls and studying history. You left thrift unchallenged. I believe you, like your parents, continued to cherish it throughout your life as a form of virtue. Throwing nothing away, reusing everything. You dared not subscribe to newspapers, you told Van Dis, they would just pile up in your flat without you being able to get rid of the paper mountain. I heard from someone in the know that you owned only a few garments. When you had worn a skirt to pieces after ten years, you would go to the shop to buy the exact same one again. You were highly indignant when it turned out that the model in question had disappeared from the shelves years earlier.   

I admire the relentlessness with which you have remained true to what drove you and made you curious throughout your life. You studied, obtained a PhD, attended archives school and eventually became deputy archivist at the Amsterdam municipal archives. You didn't want to go any higher than that, it would only distract you from what you were so passionate about: digging through archives, searching and finding, meticulous note-taking. You did not want more than this, nor less. You lived for the archive, in the archive - even after your retirement you were never far away from it. You meant it when you told Van Dis that you were glad the recording of the programme took place on a Saturday: the archive was closed anyway, you didn't have to waste valuable time.  

You were curious about just about everything, and you also published about just about everything. Hundreds of articles, volumes, source studies. I don't know whether, in your rooms on Prinsengracht, at your parents' table, amid all that tangible history in the archives, you ever wondered whether you had appointed your work as a substitute for your life. I actually don't think so. Nor would I know what it is, or should be: ‘life’. I know a lot of people with so-called lives, but whether they are alive, no idea. I do know that I always feel pretty alive when I'm obsessing about something; writing, for instance. Those months during the final sprint of a book that it takes over my days and nights, I don't care about anything else (not really; I pretend at most) and I utterly wallow in that blissful tunnel vision.  

That's pretty much how I imagine your state of being, only perpetually. You only had to be preoccupied with something (monasteries, maids, bookshops, art, guilds, trade, murders, fans, you name it) or you were immediately obsessed with it too. Whatever it was, it had to get to the bottom of it, whether what was found was fatally boring (mostly) or sensational (very occasionally) to the outside world. What an enviable talent to be so absorbed, to live your life in a truly idiosyncratic way, so averse to any fashions, societal or social expectations - the kind of expectations that, let's face it, affected women first and foremost, and still do, by the way.  

In fairness, I found you when I was looking for a murderess, the seventeenth-century maid Elsje Christiaens. I remembered that she had been drawn by Rembrandt, but I didn't know how exactly. The story was even more interesting than I thought, and your sleuthing turned out to be the reason we know it at all today.    

Rembrandt had made some drawings of a woman strung up on Amsterdam's Volewijk gallows field, with an axe in the wood above the noose. Very specific, gruesome. Art historians dated the drawings to around 1655 based on stylistic features. You were annoyed that none of these gentlemen art critics had taken the trouble to research who this woman could have been, to find out whether the dating was correct. You did take that trouble. You went through a quarter of a century of confession books, and after reading what must have been hundreds of interrogations of suspects, you came to the conclusion that the maid Elsje Christiaens was the only person sentenced to death who could have been the model for the drawings. She had been unable to pay the rent to her landlady, beating her to death with an axe during an argument. The sentence: death by strangulation to the pole, several blows to the head with the murder weapon and exhibition of the body with the axe above the head ‘to be consumed by the air and birds.’ All this took place in May 1664, and so you could see that the Rembrandt connoisseurs were about 10 years wrong with their dating.  

To your credit, you were not falsely modest about your discovery. Triumphantly, you wrote that you hoped the case would ‘serve as an example and one for art historians to be careful about dating on stylistic grounds!’ Your fight was a fight for diligence, and against the swollen egos of those who believed that history was only something to be made. Until a few years before your death, you kept searching, finding, publishing. If archivists wore armour, you would have died in one - true to how you had lived all your life.  

You cycled around the city so nicely, I heard from someone who used to see you cycling often, on your way to the city archives. Such a fun, quirky head. I don't think you were interested in that, in what kind of head you had I mean, and of course that made him fun. Of your kind there are few, I suspect since your death none at all.  

All the best,

Niña Weijers