Amsterdam and The Hague - The Netherlands - Part 2 - Golden Age

Musées des Beaux Arts....

My visit to Den Haag (The Hague) is singleminded. I have not come to watch the Dutch Parliament in session; to attend the application of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (CROATIA v. SERBIA) at the International Court of Justice; to visit one of the largest Apple Stores in the oldest shopping arcade in the Netherlands, nor to take a dip off the beach at unpronounceable Scheveningen (apparently this was the word used to get German spies to give themselves away)..... This is a lightning raid on The Mauritshuis, a recently renovated jewel in the crown of the Dutch Golden Age.

Meisje met de parel, Johannes Vermeer, c 1665

As the publicity says, the girl is back in town, and I have a date.....  Her home was designed and built in 1644 by Jacob van Campen, the most famous architect of his time (who also provided Rembrandt with his grand home in Amsterdam). Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679) commissioned it, hence its name, but he was not at home when I called.  

The new main entrance to The Mauritshuis (or you can take the glass lift)

The museum has recently undergone extensive refurbishment and modernisation which provide an airy and bright entrance lobby, as well as extended space for new exhibitions.  But the original interior, even when lit with LED systems which are calibrated to blend daylight with candleglow is as designed in the seventeenth century.  As Laura Cumming wrote in The Observer, the Mauritshuis is the ideal museum.  It's a home from home for art.  The rooms are on a human scale.....  Vermeer's Girl, for all her Mona Lisa fame, is in a modest wood-panelled chamber..... 

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens,
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1615
Primary Art - a teacher and her rat instruct young minds....

It is a place to muse, and to amuse. The Greek origin of the word museum denoted a place or temple dedicated to the Muses. Hence it has come to mean a building set apart for study and the arts. One of the more famous pictures on show here is itself of a lesson - Rembrandt's justly acclaimed The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632).....

Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson: Aris Kindt, armed robber, executed by hanging

As Jonathan Jones commented in The Guardian, the eye is led irresistibly into a dark tunnel between the arm's exposed muscles - and into the body itself. Rembrandt leads the onlooker from the visible world to the invisible darkness within. What lies there?

Self-portrait with Lace Collar, 1629

As Rembrandt himself looks confidently out at the viewing public, I muse on what it is that I am seeing. Why have I come all this way? Jonathan Jones suggests that, the true reason to come here is to encounter some of the world's most profound works of art. Perhaps I should have spent more time in Den Haag, and visited the International Court of Justice. It is fitting perhaps that the Mauritshuis and the Peace Palace are near neighbours. Somehow I feel that Vermeer and Rembrandt still work as ambassadors for peace, and that whatever else we gain from great art the very act of admiring such works is in itself an act of peace:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

But I hasten to Amsterdam.....

And go straight to the also recently refurbished Rijksmuseum, a great palace of art, exhausting in its dimensions and in its scope. 

The Rijksmuseum is the museum of the Netherlands.  It was first opened in 1800 (ironically in Den Haag), but moved to Amsterdam in 1808 and then to its current location in 1885. It has recently been extensively refurbished, and when I was last here, about five years ago, less than half the collection was on view.  

Rembrandt's De Nachtwacht, 1642

Now there is more than enough.  I mean, much more.  From the Middle Ages through the Golden Age, to Dutch Colonialism, to (almost) now.  Guess who I find looking a little uneasy beneath all the pomp and splendour?

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1886-87)

Everywhere there are talking points, pictures to amuse, artefacts, sculptures, allegories, portraits.  Sometimes, I almost feel the models are here to admire themselves....

But what leads me out, takes me from myself here are the pictures of life....  In the Mauritshuis there were wonderful pictures of life, by Jan Steen for example, and here, with David Teniers, in his Peasant Kermis (1665), you get an impression of the world as it is.  I particularly like the complex visions of village activity in winter, like this:

Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, 1608

But I also enjoy the pictures that you could almost walk out into, like this Amsterdam canal scene, though there are fewer cars (or bicycles!) and more leaves on the trees in this picture than now.....

Jan van der Heyden, Amsterdam View with Houses on the Herengracht.... (1670)

And outside, this elegant city is a museum in itself. The canals reflect the buildings and light fills the windows, and the shifting shapes of the narrow-fronted houses bring to mind the world with which de Hooch and Vermeer might have been familiar.

And the waters of the canals, the bridges and boats, cannot have changed that much.....

And the sky, the sense of space and the vanishing points, are still in the air.....

It is not difficult to dream a little in Amsterdam. Musing in the galleries and then wandering one way or another, time hangs lightly draped across your shoulders. The canals seep an atmosphere of quiet. At the Vishuisje Herengracht I have a snack of oysters and a delicious herring broodje (sandwich) and feel that the world is not such a bad place after all.

And in the Cafe Bouwman, close by, I make a new friend (though I understand that felines are no longer allowed in bars by law....)

In the Vondelpark, the willows do not so much weep as relax, their tendrils hair-like in the winter cool....

And on the canals themselves, as dusk gathers, the lights glow warm and welcoming.....

My trip to Amsterdam was not singleminded. I was not only there for the Museum.  Even when ice and snow gather and life slows to winter rhythms....

And over the water sails a boat, just like back then

Though it is cold outside, Peace comes dropping slow in this most picturesque of places.....  And the evening closes with supper with a family of old friends who live overlooking one of the quieter canals. On the third floor of what once was a convent school we eat and drink and discuss the politics of museums, the nature of the Netherlands, and the passing of time. 

Good night, Amsterdam......  Let's drink to another Golden Age!

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood....

W H Auden

Holland - The Netherlands - Part 1

Windmills of the mind.....

Windmills (or rather Wind Turbines) at Enkhuizen haven, the IJsselmeer behind.

Only half the Kingdom of the Netherlands is more than one metre above sea level, and eighteen per cent of its surface area is water. With a population of nearly seventeen million the number of people per square kilometre of land is nearly five hundred, which puts it up close to Bangladesh and South Korea in the population density stakes.....

Low Country: Lelystad from the Houtribdijk

It was not always so.  The Dutch Golden Age, in the 17th century, saw economic growth with the Dutch East and West India Companies creating colonies and trading posts across the globe; settlements included New Amsterdam in North America and the Cape Colony in South Africa; art and science flourished.  But after the boom came something of a bust, and from Napoleon to Hitler, despite being a constitutional monarchy since 1815 and a parliamentary democracy since 1848, the Netherlands have had their share of troubles.

Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with bleaching grounds, 1670 - 1675

The population of The Netherlands has almost quadrupled in the last hundred years, and perhaps this has driven the extraordinary developments in land reclamation and modernisation. Despite the crowded nature of the country, it is one of the world's ten leading exporting countries and food production is its largest industry. Rotterdam is the busiest port in Europe. In addition The Netherlands is the only country which has an action plan to cope with rising sea levels due to global warming. It has a golden past, but is also thinking ahead.

View of Delft, 1660 - 1661, Johannes Vermeer

In the centre of the administrative capital, The Hague, imaginative new buildings dwarf the bars and restaurants around the Plein....

But the great conurbations are all well and good; for the moment I yearn for the sense of space that was caught by those masters of the landscape.  

Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Cottages, 1665

Meindert Hobbema's The Avenue at Middelharnis is one of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery, London, with its extraordinary symmetry and depth.   His pictures teem with life, from people tending their gardens, to riders with their dogs, but all human activity is secondary to the immensity of the sky and the growth of the trees.  Hobbema was apparently a pupil of his friend, Jacob van Ruisdael, but the influence of the latter's uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael is also noticeable in his work.

Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with Ferry, 1649

It must have been comparatively easy to walk out of Amsterdam, or Utrecht, or Leiden, and find views of rural scenes in that Golden Age. Today, apart from urbanisation, there are 139,295 kilometres of roads in the Netherlands, as well as 3,013 kilometres of rail track.  There are said to be nine million cars (and eighteen million bicycles) in the country, so finding a quiet spot is a test of initiative - but it is not impossible.....  

Church and Windmill at Loenen aan de Vecht

With so little variation in topography (the highest point in The Netherlands is little over three hundred metres above sea level) and the absence of true forest (the last original natural woods were felled in 1871) it is not easy to find an interesting landscape. Heathland, meadows, mud flats, farmlands and non-native plantations are the order of the day, but still the great painters of the past created memorable images.....

Landscape with Two Oaks, Jan van Goyen, 1641

And their more modern followers have not done so badly either.....

Lake near Loosdrecht, Willem Roelofs, 1887

Which is not far from where I find this....

Loosdrecht Lakes

And, less conventionally, this....

What has saved the landscape of The Netherlands is the presence of water.  It is everywhere, in one shape or form or another - canal, river, lake, rain, snow, ice..... Reflections of the sky in Leiden brighten the place and also add space and air.....

Elsewhere the shimmering gleam of large expanses of water and sky unite to create a feeling of liberation.....

Though there is little doubt that the addition of a mill, in this case by a one of the great modern Dutch masters, makes for a better composition.....

Oostzijdse Mill along the Gein River, 1903, Piet Mondrian

This has been a fascinating journey, in part beyond my expectations.  Initially I wanted to see where Rembrandt walked, and sketched, but in this I was thwarted by the modern world.  However, the streets of old Leiden where Rembrandt grew up are still quiet and evocative of the past......  Some of the houses like these around the Pieterskerk were where the original Pilgrim Fathers settled, escaping religious persecution in England.  From Leiden some of them, including an ancestor of Barack Obama, set sail on the Speedwell, in July 1620, to meet with the Mayflower in Plymouth before attempting to cross the Atlantic (the Speedwell had to be abandoned in Dartmouth).

In wandering across the IJsselmeer, and driving down toward Utrecht, I also came across another surprise.  A slightly dated Italian TCI guide book mentioned, in a footnote, that the village of Laren contained a small art gallery in the former home of an American couple, William and Anna Singer. Here they had built a villa, which they called Wild Swans, in 1911, and, with inheritance from his father's Pittsburgh steelworks, he started collecting paintings of the Hague School and contemporary Dutch artists.  

I was in for a further surprise, however.  With car parks overflowing and a buzzing crowd in the foyer, I was not to find the works of Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915), who painted the village pond nearby, and his contemporaries....

The Koesweerd Pond, Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig

But a major exhibition dedicated solely to the life and work of Leo Gestel (1881 - 1941) who, together with Piet Mondrian, was one of the most prominent Dutch Modernists.

Gestel spent time in Paris, and in Majorca, Germany, Italy and Flanders, and he experimented with pointillism, fauvism, cubism and futurism (among other -isms!) Several of his works depict Dutch landscapes, some in summery Cezanne-like colour....

Others in monochrome, in keeping with the current season....

But others are portraits, dazzling in their colours....

This was a surprise indeed.  We had come a long way from the Golden Age, and my intention to find and emulate the early masters had come unstuck.  It was time to withdraw, and to rest a while within the warmth and depth of a Dutch interior.  Just down the road, unnervingly on the Brink (which I am relieved to learn means the village green) we found Cafe t' Bonte Paard (The Spotted Horse), where thick pea soup and dark beer smoothed over the wrinkles of post-modernism.  

Meanwhile, out on the IJsselmeer, those windmills are still turning, patiently waiting for the next master.....

Big Garden Birdwatch

My feathered friends

Can you hear me love?

It may be a far cry from the exotic worlds so readily available today via High Definition TV, with the soft sound track of David Attenborough, but our garden is full of life, and some of it is very colourful.

It's not a big garden, and it is a little dark, with a huge laurel hedge on one side, opposite the house, and two ivy covered fences on the sides.  Some birds don't trust it, and so where we used to have jackdaws and magpies, there's now more food for the others.  

Robins are very territorial, and this one has claimed our garden for his own. He is quite fussy, and sometimes gives other species a bit of hassle, but most of the time he is pretty accommodating.

I was surprised therefore when I saw this the other day:

Which led to this:

Which could have been nasty, except that I had forgotten that sunshine means spring, and spring means making eggs, while the sun shines.  It must have been a bit of a shock when the next day it snowed!

I would love to say we get all sorts in our garden, and we do occasionally get visitors - I recently saw a female Blackcap here, who must be overwintering, but I didn't manage to get her photo, and I saw four Long-tailed tits fly over before Christmas, and we often get Coal tits in the summer - but in general the population is as you see in these pictures, all taken in the last week:

Blue tits are quite common, and they have nested here in some years, though as they are so little, I don't think their survival rate is that high....

Handsome Great tits also pop in to grab some seeds, but they are quicker to flit in and out than the little Blues.

I won't admit to having favourites, but I am very fond of the House Sparrows that are regulars at our feeders.  They may not be very tuneful, but they are sociable birds, and though perhaps a little scruffy, they can be very smart when they make the effort:

The males have fetching grey caps, and fashionable stubble:

The Hedge Sparrow, or Dunnock, is no relation, and prefers scratching about on the ground in the flower beds to dining at the feeders.  I used to think they were drab little birds, but they're not, being kitted out with a tweedy sort of suit and whispy trousers, and their agile movements and bright eyes go quite well with their extraordinary breeding habits, which effectively mean that if you have three Dunnocks in your garden you may well have at least two pairs.....

Blackbirds do well here, and their varied diet means that they are happy at the table and just as happy on the ground, where they will take worms and slugs and grubs, turning their heads so they can see what's going on (strangely they do not have parallax vision, so each eye is only covering one side).

The male stands out, with his coal black feathers and gold beak and eye rings, but the female is no less a bird, with her rich brown dapple, and she too has gold eye-liner.... 

Though if it is gold you want, then it's this little bird you want to watch.  Unlike the others the Goldfinch really only seems to like nyger seed, though in fact I see flocks of them in the fields at this time of year stripping thistles and umbelliferae of their seeds....  We have had families of these, and they always used to come to feed in pairs, but sadly, at the moment, there is only one.....

One of the most colourful birds, however, is the Starling.  When seen in their thousands at dusk, or when in flocks on farmland or strutting about on your lawn at a distance, they seem to be grey unattractive, but in fact they are shimmeringly bright with blues and speckles, the younger ones being lighter, sometimes almost fawn, the mature adults glistening with a sharp sheen.  They are acrobatic, too, and have a gift for mimicry which has even stretched to them imitating telephone rings to send humans back inside their houses!

Starlings are in decline, they say, and this is partly why the Big Garden Birdwatch is so important.  By inputting the received data, the experts in the world of ornithology can build up their knowledge of species - which are doing well, and which may need protection.  It may be great if you spot some rarity in your garden, but it is no problem if all you see is a tiny wren.  It may be spectacular to see a Red Kite circling overhead, or a Sparrow Hawk blasting past on a killing spree.  Woodpeckers and Jays are marvellous to see close up, and the glinting eyes of Magpies or the raucous voice of the Carrion Crow are things to marvel at, but this Big Garden Birdwatch is not about particulars like that; it is about mapping the commonplace, so that we can understand our everyday world a little better.  Woodpigeons may not be special, 

And I wouldn't mind putting this one in a pie, especially if he was the one who plundered my purple sprouting on my allotment, but he's welcome in our garden, pigeon toes and all!

My assistant bird watcher is particularly fond of him!

Though in fact, the birds just keep a respectful distance.....  We all get along just fine, and that, I think, is what is so wonderful about it all.....

If you go to the RSPB website https://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/ you will be able to register your interest, and eventually also upload your findings.

Last year over half a million people took part, noting some seven million birds.  The following is from the webpage:

Why take part?

Bird populations are a great indicator of the health of the countryside. That's why it's so important to take part in surveys like Big Garden Birdwatch to keep an eye on the ups and downs of the wildlife where we live.

All you need to do is spend an hour over the weekend of 24-25 January counting the birds in your garden. It's that simple!

The more people involved, the more we can learn. So, grab a cuppa and together we can all help to give nature a home.

Post Script:  January 24th
Big Garden Birdwatch 

No pigeons or doves in sight, and only a couple, respectively, of the sparrows and starlings, and no great tit.......  But a wren (unfortunately I missed getting a picture) and two goldfinches!  Yay!