The Upside-Down World

Meetings with the Dutch Masters

By: Benjamin Moser

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country's great museums.

Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp.

Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway—and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?

The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

©2023 Benjamin Moser (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Glad to have listened.....

Good book. Had the physical for the pictures. Will listen to again. Could have read it but my eyes are lazy nowadays

The scope of the project and the detail of each artists history.

A fascinating look into the Golden Age of Dutch painters. Deeply personal to the author and rich with a point of view that stands out from other art historians.

Great Book

If you love art history and the Dutch Golden Age, you will love this book. It goes so deep on the specific artists and the history of the period, that my own knowledge has multiplied many times. And I love the artwork that much more as well.