Anaïs van Ertvelde
Schrijver, geschiedkundige en docent aan het KASK
No, that is not how one holds a palette. Surely there is a proper method for doing so, calibrated to the body of the person a painter is supposed to be.
The art teacher looks at me impatiently, as though I could force my long-fingerless right hand through that thumb hole by sheer will alone. At home, I stroke it on the head, my hand, paint little eyes on him, a little nose, a mouth, and call it little mole.
‘Little crab’, your hand, did not fit into palettes either. Though it seems to me that, for a craftsman, it would not be difficult to carve a paintboard of birchwood around our hands as well.
Both our hands disappear into the pockets of our coats.
My school photograph, yours in Rembrandt’s portrait.
Was that your choice or his?
I quickly conclude that I cannot paint.
But writing, that I can do.
Yet with the little-finger side of my left hand I smear the ink across my exercise book into curtains of northern lights.
The right shape of hand this time, but in the wrong place.
Little crab, little mole, and little swan
In my blotchy handwriting, an old Dutch nursery rhyme takes shape.
The girls with blonde, braided hair, caught up in their clapping game.
Their hands first claws, then fists, then flapping wings.
Fearlessly assuming the forms they would rather not see on another kind of body.
Lucille Werner
Inclusive media trailblazer at AVROTROS
‘In life, you should give this girl an extra-large doll,’ a doctor once said to my parents. When I look at Jan Asselijn’s masterpiece The Threatened Swan , I wonder whether the same was ever said about him.
Excelling with a disability is still far from the norm. That is precisely the reason this painting touches on something I am familiar with: taking up space when that space is not readily given to you. I am moved that Asselijn is now remembered not as ‘the painter with a disability’ but as one of the great artists. That is what inclusion is all about.
Yet it is important not to erase his background. Not because it defines him, but because it shows what is possible. In the course of my work, I often ask who we are still not seeing and whose stories we are still not hearing. To me, this painting also says: protect a person by making space for them, not by keeping them small. That, perhaps, is the essence – it is his talent that makes him exceptional, not his disability. That is why it is only natural that he belongs in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour.
Taco Dibbits
Director of the Rijksmuseum
The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn hangs in the Gallery of Honour. Life-size, the swan energetically spreads her wings, stretches her neck and – hissing – opens her beak wide. She is protecting her nest from the dog swimming towards her. The intense contrasts and backlighting heighten the hostile situation and tense pose, while subtle details such as the downy, almost weightless feathers that have come loose with her movement add to the sense of action. We might interpret the swan as a symbol of vigilance, protection and fearlessness.
As part of his initiation into a Dutch artists’ society while studying in Rome (c. 1635–1644), Asselijn was given the nickname Crabbetje , or ‘Little Crab’. The biographer Arnold Houbraken wrote that Asselijn had ‘a scorched hand and crooked fingers … such that he could barely hold his palette with it’. It does not seem to have held Asselijn back. He became a master landscape painter who now and then made an animal his main subject – but never a little crab. And yet, in the swan we may recognise the same powerful and steadfast bearing as that of the armoured crab. Asselijn’s swan is one of the finest paintings in the Gallery of Honour and a big favourite with the public.
