The Venice of the North
There is something indescribably rejuvenating about being away from a regular routine and about the depth of perspective that comes from living for a time in a different culture. So it was in Amsterdam, the Venice of the North. Although we quite often fly to South Africa on KLM via Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, I had never spent any time in Holland’s capital city, and we decided to break the journey there for three days.
We stayed up a winding staircase on the top attic floor of one of the fabled rowhouses on the Heerengracht, and it’s fair to say that we walked the city flat—when we weren’t dodging bicycles! Since I’d grown up speaking Afrikaans, I was curious to know if I would be able to get along in Dutch, but alas no. Although I could read it, and I could make myself understood when pressed for information on a railway station platform, the Dutch language is more guttural, more melodic, and more convoluted than Afrikaans—though I suspect I could pick it up if I stayed there for any time. But, in any event, the Dutch are multi-lingual and speak English, especially in Amsterdam, and we could get by easily.
We wanted to make it a museum trip—and even the city itself is like a work of art. The canals, the bridges, the cobbled streets, the higgledy-piggledy rowhouses make for a stunning picture at every turn.
Our first true museum stop was the Van Gogh Museum, where we had timed-entrance tickets for the afternoon we arrived. Of course, despite the paucity of success for Van Gogh during his lifetime, you can now see his work in any museum of note, but to see this personal collection of his younger brother, Theo—and later Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and their son, Vincent—is to experience his work in an intimately poignant way. What is also wonderful is that, although the bulk of the collection is Van Gogh, other artists are represented too, including, surprisingly, someone like Henri Fantin Latour. It’s an extraordinary legacy of a complicated man and the brother who supported him as best he could.
When The Frick offered their Vermeer exhibition in 2013, we went up to New York to see it with Cape Town friends who were visiting at the time. Of course, Girl With a Pearl Earring, in pride of place, made us all misty-eyed, and I was eager to re-visit her in her home at the Mauritshuis in The Hague—especially after all the brouhaha of the recent Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. Also, in the interim I had read The Goldfinch and, just recently, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death, Laura Cumming’s extraordinary biography of the 17th-century Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius, who made The Goldfinch. His painting is also housed in the Mautitshuis, so it was a double imperative to visit.
Fabritius was older than Johannes Vermeer, but they overlapped in Delft where Fabritius lived for a time and Vermeer his whole life. It was here that Fabritius lost his life in the massive explosion—the thunderclap—in 1654 when a gunpowder store blew up and devasted the city. Deciding to break our southbound train journey in Delft before heading west to The Hague on the North Sea coast, we came to a city that seemed almost unchanged from the 17th century. It wasn’t such a stretch to envision Delft being populated by people like Vermeer and Fabritius, and I tried to capture a sense of it with this little video of the Markt, the main square where the Stadhuis (Town Hall) and Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) are located.
We had some time to walk alongside the canal where Vermeer painted The Little Street in Delft (now housed at the Rijksmuseum) before we caught the train to The Hague—home to the U.N.’s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
The Mauritshuis is a city palace on the Plein in the center of The Hague, within walking distance of the train station, and it is the small intimacy of the museum that makes it so magical. That, and its formidable collection from the golden age of Dutch and Flemish paintings of the 17th century. You can wander from one quiet, stately room to another, drinking in the art, stopping to look at the city through the long windows, and retracing your steps to look, and look again.
We were lucky: both Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch were hanging, and to be in their presence, to see how the light falls on them and how they speak to the room is an indelible experience. But there are around 850 treasures in the collection, including Holbein’s famous portrait of Lady Jane Seymour, a portrait of Rembrandt as an old man, an extraordinary chiaroscuro painting by Rubens of an old woman and boy with candles, just on and on…
The Rijksmuseum, with its 8,000 works of art, is a different experience. Even though we visited on a Wednesday, The Gallery of Honour, where most of the Rembrandts and Vermeers are hung, was really quite crowded, and I found myself viewing the works obliquely to avoid a blur of heads in front of me. Rembrandt’s Night Watch masterpiece is in the process of being restored as they look into the best way of removing the varnish without causing any damage to the paint itself, and they study the effect of vibrations on the canvas and how to minimize any possibility of movement in the canvas itself. During this process, it is hanging on the wall at the rear of the glass chamber, but, rather than this being disappointing, it was fascinating to see the work in progress. Although a masterwork like this can seem like a set piece, fixed in time and space, it was moving to be witness to its vulnerability.
Venturing deeper into the Rijksmuseum, I became bewitched by an early Rembrandt self-portrait. I wondered how many myriad people from all over the world have met his shadowed gaze as he looks out at you from under his mop of curly hair. It is this intimacy of being face-to-face with great art that transforms you.