About this item
A single day in Amsterdam, 1632. The Surgeons Guild has commissioned a young artist named Rembrandt to paint Dr. Nicolaes Tulp as he performs a medical dissection. In the swirl of anticipation and intrigue surrounding the event, we meet an extraordinary constellation of men and women whose lives hinge, in some way, on Dr. Tulps anatomy lesson. There is Aris the Kid, the condemned coat thief whose body is to be used for the dissection Flora, his pregnant lover Jan Fetchet, the curio dealer who acquires corpses for the doctors work the great Ren Descartes, who will attend the dissection in his quest to understand where the human soul resides and the Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment. As the story builds to its dramatic conclusion, circumstances conspire to produce a famous paintingand an immortal painter.
About the Author
Nina Siegal has been a regular freelance contributor for since 2012. Based in Amsterdam, she covers museums, exhibitions, art restoration and attribution issues, art world discoveries and legal cases, profiles of conductors, filmmakers, dancers and other cultural figures, and culture in a socio-political context. An occasional general-news reporter, she has also written about migration issues, emerging political parties and legal cases in the Netherlands. Siegal began reporting for in 1997 as a stringer for the San Francisco bureau, and worked for ' "The City" section in New York from 1998 to 2000, covering Harlem and The Bronx. After that, she spent four years as the cultural news and art market reporter for in New York. Siegal was born in New York City, graduated with a BA in English Literature from Cornell University and received her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In addition to , her freelance writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the , and the . She was the launching editor of , managing editor of , and a founding creative editor of , a Dutch art magazine. Nina has written two novels: (Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday, 2014) and (HarperCollins, 2008) . For her fiction, she has received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing, two MacDowell Colony fellowships, and the post-graduate Jack Leggett Fellowship from Iowa. Her first novel was top finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.
