The Woman Beside the Painter: I Am You by Victoria Redel

BY WILLIAMAYE JONES

History remembers the names of great artists, while the lives around them fade into the margins. Studios, apprentices, assistants, and the quiet labor that supports artistic creation rarely survive in historical records. Victoria Redel’s novel I Am You (Firefinch, March 2026) enters precisely that space, imagining the life of Gerta Pieters, assistant to the celebrated Dutch still-life painter Maria van Oosterwijck.

Set in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, the novel unfolds in a world shaped by trade, religion, artistic ambition, and strict social expectations. Within this richly layered setting, Redel explores what it might mean to live beside genius rather than at its center.

Redel’s interest in Gerta began with a small but persistent historical trace. In scattered archival references surrounding Maria van Oosterwijck, Gerta appears briefly as an assistant. For Redel, that fleeting reference suggested an entire life waiting to be imagined.

Gerta becomes a narrator who observes and adapts, moving through the social layers of the Dutch Golden Age with curiosity and caution. Her position in the studio gives her access to a world few women of her background could enter. At the same time, it keeps her firmly in the shadows of another person’s reputation.

As Redel describes it, discovering Gerta’s voice felt less like invention than recognition. “It was as if when I learned that there was a Gerta,” she says, “she arrived to me impatient to begin speaking.” That voice allows the novel to explore questions of identity and transformation. Gerta shifts between roles—assistant, observer, companion—never fully belonging to any single social position. Through her narration, readers experience the studio not only for its art but as a space of negotiation, ambition, and careful survival.

At the center of the novel lies the relationship between Maria and Gerta. Their partnership is shaped by unequal power: Maria the celebrated painter, Gerta the assistant whose labor makes the work possible. Yet the relationship is far more fluid than those roles suggest. As Redel explains, the power relationship between the two women is never simple. “On the one hand, it is fixed by their roles as servant and employer,” she says, “yet those relationships are continuously challenged by both women in subtle and overt ways.” Gerta’s devotion draws her deeper into Maria’s life, complicating that balance. “Gerta is devoted to Maria,” Redel explains, “and that devotion allows her to become ever more entwined with and essential to Maria, while at the same time she increasingly develops her own identity and sense of artistic integrity.”

author photo by George Rings

Redel adds further pressures: illness, artistic fame, and the social limitations faced by women artists. “The broth gets really thick and, hopefully, unpredictable,” she says, noting that the Dutch Republic itself was undergoing enormous change during the period, shifting social freedoms and constraints shaping the lives of both women. Much of that tension plays out in the studio, where artistic creation begins long before the brush touches canvas. As Redel notes, the process involves constant preparation: “grinding pigments, arranging objects, preparing surfaces.” Through Gerta’s perspective, readers witness the hidden labor behind the still-life paintings that would eventually hang in collectors’ homes.

Through that lens, the broader world of Dutch still-life painting comes into sharper focus. Seventeenth-century artists such as Maria van Oosterwijck worked in a visual language rich with symbolism, where flowers, insects, fruit, and objects carried layers of meaning. These images were rarely simple decoration. They served as quiet reminders of beauty, transience, mortality, and the fleeting nature of worldly success.

Redel’s attention to the physical processes behind painting invites readers to see these works not merely as finished masterpieces but as something painstakingly constructed through discipline and craft. Within that environment, learning to paint becomes transformative for Gerta. Her work gradually shifts from preparation to observation and understanding. Watching Maria work, she begins to see how composition, color, and texture shape viewers’ perceptions of the world.

The path toward artistic recognition was rarely straightforward for women in the Dutch Republic. Guild membership and formal training were often inaccessible, leaving many women to develop their work within private studios or under the patronage of more established artists. Against that backdrop, the evolving partnership between Maria and Gerta raises questions about who creates, who assists, who receives credit.

Art in the novel is never separate from power. Redel observes that artistic production involves questions of visibility and authorship: who is allowed to create, who is allowed to be seen, and who is allowed to claim recognition for the work itself. Those tensions echo throughout Gerta’s story. Her presence in the studio allows her to witness artistic brilliance, yet it also forces her to confront the limits placed on her own ambitions. The novel becomes a meditation on proximity: what it means to live beside greatness and what is gained or lost in that closeness.

Historical fiction often invites writers to imagine the lives that official records overlook. Redel notes that the surviving fragments about Gerta offered “enough to suggest a life but not enough to fully reveal it,” leaving space for imagination to enter carefully and respectfully. For Redel, that balance between fact and invention allows fiction to illuminate lives that history recorded only in passing.

The novel’s title reflects this layered relationship between artist and assistant. I Am You suggests both identification and separation, capturing the complicated intimacy that develops between two women working within the same creative world.

Ultimately, Redel hopes readers will see Gerta not simply as a historical footnote but as a fully realized life. Through her voice, the novel illuminates the quiet presence behind artistic creation: the woman beside the painter whose story history nearly forgot. In giving voice to that overlooked life, I Am You reminds us how many histories still wait quietly in the margins, ready to be told.

About the contributor: Williamaye Jones is a historical fiction writer and editor with 25 years’ publishing experience. She is currently querying her fifteenth-century novel, Virago, and working on another novel set in Renaissance Italy. A book reviewer and feature writer for the Historical Novels Review Society, she leads the HNS Southeast Texas Chapter.