While Benjamin Moser worked for about ten years on the biography of Susan Sontag (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), he spent twenty years collecting knowledge and insight about the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. That paid off, as can be seen in the resulting book.
One of the ‘great revelations’ of my life, writes Benjamin Moser, was discovering Dutch painting of the seventeenth century in Dutch museums: ‘room after room, wing after wing.’ When he visited a museum it was as if he had slept well or had gone for a run: he was ‘calmer, happier and better focused’. But most importantly, it gave him the impression “that there was something here that I needed to know.”
The fact that there was something here ‘that he needed to know’ coincided with his move, twenty-five years ago, from Houston in the United States to the Netherlands. Becoming familiar with a new country was no small matter for Moser, in fact it was ‘a mind-boggling experience’. No matter how hard he tried, the Netherlands remained a foreign country to him. He had to answer a whole series of existential questions, including the question of what and who he actually was. This began a process of regeneration and…
