The Upside-Down World cover art

The Upside-Down World

Meetings with the Dutch Masters

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Upside-Down World

By: Benjamin Moser
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

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
Art Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers

Listeners also enjoyed...

Last Light cover art
The Da Vinci Women cover art
Salvador Dalí cover art
Hilma af Klint cover art
Austin Osman Spare (Revised & Expanded Edition) cover art
Rembrandt Is in the Wind cover art
Broad Strokes cover art
Fierce Poise cover art
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 cover art
Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World cover art
No reviews yet