Bilderdijk’s parents

These two portraits are examples of a ‘silhouette’ or shadow portrait. That genre became popular in the second half of the eighteenth century. Sometimes the work was drawn or cut, sometimes etched or done as an aquatint. The portrait genre is reminiscent of the time of the young Goethe, Werther and the Weimarer Klassik, but was also popular in the Netherlands, although the hype lasted relatively short here. Thousands of silhouettes must have been created, often by itinerant artists offering their services.

The physician Isaäc Bilderdijk (1720-1798) was Willem's father. A contemporary described him as a dignified man with a dark and ‘recoilous appearance’, with heavy black-gray eyebrows. It was a man to fear. He stimulated the ambition of his precocious son. According to Bilderdijk, his father gave him a book by Jacob Cats when he was eighteen months old: ‘I still feel the eagerness with which I saw through him, sniffed through him, and now here, then there, started to read.’

At the same age, Bilderdijk said, he was already familiar with Biblical history and classical mythology. He remembered sitting on his grandmother's lap telling her about history. Every morning during breakfast immediately after getting up, his father quizzed little Willem. That was not without consequences. From a young age, he said he suffered from a 'whizzing' head. Later Bilderdijk wrote: ‘The weakening of the brain was there when I was only three years old (as I very well remember this)’.

Bilderdijk was not very fond of his mother, Sibilla Bilderdijk-Duyzenddaalders (1731-1789). She is the great absentee in his work. It is telling that the man who wrote about anything and everything never dedicated a verse to his mother. Her uneven temper made Willem's life a curse from the age of five, he later claimed. When she died in 1789, it didn't affect him. In a letter he sent his wife the day before the funeral, he didn't say a word about it, but happily chatted about summer clothes and thanked his wife for the asparagus she'd sent him. Still, Bilderdijk could not break free from his mother. Afterwards, he considered the vehemence of his own character to be not only a legacy from his father, but above all from his mother.