Rights sold
- Büchergilde (Germany)
About the book
Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht (1912-2013), daughter of an Austrian baroness and an Amsterdam patrician, divided her youth between Catholic boarding schools and a castle with seventy rooms. This beginning would prove to be the springboard for a multifaceted artist’s career and a life full of friendships and romances. She married Amsterdam’s ex-mayor Arnold d’Ailly and threw her lot in with the mysterious German poet Wolfgang Frommel and his crowd of young friends, to whom she offered shelter in her small Amsterdam apartment during the Nazi occupation. After the war, this gave rise to an exclusive house enshrouded in secrecy, ‘Castrum Peregrini’: Gisele’s own canal house family. Gisele succeeded in presenting her life as a fairy tale. But what did the reality behind the elegant façade actually look like? How did the liberated painter mange to survive in the misogynistic society of Castrum Peregrini? In The Age of Gisèle, Annet Mooij reconstructs her dynamic and fascinating life with an exceptional eye for detail.
