Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote two books that can be called novels, Beautiful Roselijn, or the Steadfast Love of Panthus (1650) and The Punished Abduction, or the Victorious Reparation of the Youth Haegaenveld, Illuminated with the Curious Adventures of the Dutch Nymphs (1669) [Figs. 76 and 77]. Written in an idiosyncratic Dutch, rich in detail, plot sideroads, and even some engravings, they feature Dordrecht youngsters whose amorous escapades eventually involve Finnish shamans, Ukrainian cossacks, African elephants, and a high priest devoted to Isis.

In a 2002 lecture, the Amsterdam historian of literature, Marijke Spies, put forward the thesis that Van Hoogstraten was the first Dutch novelist: his two books inspired various similar works among his Dordrecht friends that adumbrate the eighteenth-century writings of Betje Wolff (1738-1804) and Aagje Deken (1741-1804), who are generally regarded as the founders of the genre in the Netherlands. This chapter shall explore Professor Spies’ striking statement and determine the place of Van Hoogstraten's books in the early history of the Dutch novel.

In fact, contemporaries indeed esteemed Van Hoogstraten as a writer. Arnold Houbraken wondered whether his master was better at poetry than at painting. Lambert Bidloo (1638-1724) even included Van Hoogstraten among his ekphrastic portraits of Dutch writers, the Panpoeticum Batavum (1720), as having reached the level of Pieter Cornelisz Hooft (1581-1647). Maybe he deemed the painter's tragedy concerning a siege of Dordrecht (anno 1084) comparable to the latter's monumental History of the Netherlands; yet Hooft also wrote drama with a pastoral setting, shared by Van Hoogstraten's novels. Writing in 1833, finally, the Dordrecht lawyer and amateur poet Peter Schull (1791-1835) asserted that Van Hoogstraten's literary qualities greatly surpassed his talents in the figurative arts: his poetry, even though ‘not free from the old roughness of versification’ was ‘noble and grand, often even sublime and brave’. Schull's remark suggests that at least in Dordrecht, the master's writings remained well known more than a century after his death. None of these statements, however, explained what exactly was worthy of praise in Van Hoogstraten's writings.

In some respects, the two novels confirm Peter Thissen's and Celeste Brusati's cogent thesis that much of the painter-poet's work expressed his ambitions to fashion his professional career.