Day 5 and 6 - Vermeer, Rembrandt, Coincidences and a Concert
My feet are complaining but my heart is full. Sounds and smells from the day are reverberating - the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle along the canals, the sound of a Eurasian blackbird singing over the mopeds and cars, baby ducks dodging boats, bumblebees buzzing in the hollyhocks, cats lost in reverie in the windows, a Ukrainian double bass player playing Air on a G string with such nuance and tonal richness amidst a blur of mostly unnoticing tourists by the Rijksmuseum, the intoxicating scent of old wood in the old library, the glisten of light on the water and reflections of clouds, the harpist who looks like a Botticelli angel playing mournful glissandi in Sequentia 2 by Berio, hearing my Mom’s voice answer the phone with such excitement, hearing church bells.
It was another day of exploring the city. I still don’t have a grasp at all on where things are mainly because I am map challenged and also because the city is based on a half moon shape where you think you are heading one direction which then cuts back along a curve. I actually like not knowing the layout well because I am excited over again when I find myself in a familiar square or on a familiar stretch of canal. Nevertheless, google maps is my best friend here and I fully embrace tourist nerd with my iphone strapped around my neck and the phone jangling as I walk along. It calms me enormously knowing that I won’t actually drop my iphone in a canal or off the side of a boat or leave it on a cafe table. I also tried out my moneybelt for the first time today which was awkward because it involves unbuttoning my stomach button to get to the zipper where my credit card is. I suppose I could wear it on top of my clothes but that sort of defeats the purpose. Or like other days, just keep it in my backpack. I had to try it since I wasn’t allowed to use my backpack in the museum. Of course I was able to retrieve it when I actually needed it in the shop.
That’s one of the challenges with getting older I guess. Trying to manage anxiety by being perhaps overly safe. It is actually working for me, though!
I arrived around lunchtime at my new hotel for the last two nights here which is a block from the Rijksmuseum. I love it. The room is very small but not claustrophobic and happily the window opens so that I have fresh air and a breeze. I’m on the top floor which is nice, too. I spent some time in the bright sun in the gardens outside of the museum and was very surprised to see the family I had ridden the escalator with coming from north of the city right there with me at the garden. I had made eye contact with the boy on the escalator and otherwise wouldn’t have remembered or noticed. Another coincidence happened at the concert in the evening. More later.
I had downloaded the app for the museum so that I didn’t need to purchase an audio tour since I could listen to it with my own phone. The museum was of course overwhelming but I decided to go for the most essential artworks tour knowing that I would get fatigued after about 2 hours which was exactly what happened. Still, I absorbed so much, appreciating the incredible brushwork, color nuances and composition of these masterworks that have stood the test of time. Since I am working on still lives in my studio, I spent awhile examining the choices of arrangement and objects in some of the paintings below. Having just struggled with mixing yellows and yellow green for painting a lemon, I was awestruck by the way the lemons were painted in the following images and the texture in the skin. It was really showing off to peel the lemon and to also paint the slices themselves with their translucency. Virtuosic.
The two Vermeer paintings of the maid pouring milk and the woman reading a letter by the window are even more incredible to see in real life than online. The glazing and thin layers of paint so subtly painted at such small size and the mood Vermeer is able to express was breathtaking. I was also interested to discover there was ONE WOMAN ARTIST in the entire main hall who painted almost exclusively complex flower arrangements. Her name was Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). She eventually married and had TEN CHILDREN and still managed to paint for the rest of her life. How did she do it? Apparently because she brought in so much money from her paintings, she and her husband were able to hire help. Still, how? Her focus must have been incredible.
(from Wikipedia) Rachel Ruysch was born on 3 June 1664 in The Hague to the scientist Frederik Ruysch and Maria Post, the daughter of the architect Pieter Post. Her father was also a professor of anatomy and botany and an amateur painter.[2] He had a vast collection of animal skeletons, and mineral and botany samples which Rachel used to practice her drawing skills.[3] At a young age she began to paint the flowers and insects of her father's collection in the popular manner of Otto Marseus van Schrieck.[4] Working from these samples Rachel matched her father's ability to depict nature with great accuracy.[5] Later, as Rachel became more accomplished, she taught her father (and also her sister, Anna Ruysch) how to paint…Art historians consider Ruysch to be one of the most talented still life artists of either sex.[6] By the time of her death at age 86 she had produced hundreds of paintings, of which more than 250 have been documented or are attributed to her.[7] Her dated works establish that she painted from the age of 15 until she was 83, a few years before her death. Historians are able to establish this with certainty because she included her age when signing her paintings.[5]
And then there was the Piece de Resistance - The Night Watch by Rembrandt, which he never titled. It is disputed whether he painted it over three years in the garden courtyard of the house where I visited because it was way too large to fit in his studio, but the woman by the painting who was answering questions suggested that it had been painted on the location where it depicted (unknown interior with daylight light coming from the left). She said that the rain would have made it challenging to paint even if the huge canvas was covered by a large awning. Here in the museum It is behind floor to ceiling glass or plexiglass panels making the central focus even more full of tension with the leader of the guard reaching his hand seemingly directly out of the canvas at all of us gawkers behind the glass.
After exploring other parts of the museum I visited the library where coins and medals were on display in addition to a library straight out of Harry Potter. I was fascinated to see they were protecting the books from dust by adorable green felt along the tops of the books. I tend to see cut felt as adorable after my intense stint of crafting with wool and making several gnome hats out of green wool. Utilitarian I suppose is the right word.
When I came out of the museum slightly blurry-eyed and dizzy from not having enough water, I was pulled by the sound of a woman singing opera arias where the Ukrainian double-bassist had been. Her singing amidst the din of traffic and for the most part inattentive people rushing by, dogs, bikes, etc. reminded me of the blackbird I heard singing this evening. (below)
Maybe it was due to my overwhelm from the Rijksmuseum and dehydration but I had a hilarious and frustrating but ultimately successful runaround trying to catch up with a boat which I had booked online that had its own app called Cultuur ferry. The main problem was that the location wasn’t working for the app to show where my iphone was located, although it did show little boats moving steadily around the canal to pick up and drop off numbers. Between trying to sort out google maps and coordinate it with the street intersections with very long dutch names and keep track of the moving boats on the other app, plus being aware that this was the last boat of the night and I didn’t know which side of the canal it would go to for pick up, I covered and retraced my steps over 45 minutes. It was really great exercise and because I was wearing a hot pink dress, the boat captain saw me at what I hoped was the right spot for pickup and pulled over. Once I was in the boat, I felt the euphoria of things working out. That is not always the case, is it?
I rode the boat to where it ended at Station Centraal and enjoyed speaking with the guide on the boat, Elina, who told me she was a journalist and did this historical talk on the boat just a few days a week. She lives herself on a houseboat. Happily my 24 hour free pass to jump on and off this Cultuur Ferry worked brilliantly the next morning. Elina is below and she took a nice photo of me so beamingly happy to have been spotted on the side of the road and catching the last ferry of the night.
I wanted to get dinner someplace picturesque (hard to avoid) before I went to this concert of Les Dames Vocales at the Walloon Church and I found a spot right next to the window serving Indian food. It was delicious. On the way i saw a fake cat in the window, just part of my growing cats in windows and on sides of building photo collection.
And then the amazing coincidence happened. At the ticket table in this church where I was about to hear a celestial concert stood Martijn, the man I had spoken with for awhile at the Hollandsche Schowburg on June 21st (the theater now turned memorial where 46,000 Jews were held before being deported to certain murder). Apparently he works there and he also is on the board of the vocal ensemble we were about to here. Below is a photo of me and Martijn who is also a singer with a couple of vocal groups. We were astounded at the coincidence of encountering one another again. He told me that in the last European elections, someone was elected who will raise taxes on all concert venues, which will have dire implications for the affordability of concert tickets for people like him who rent out church spaces for concerts.
The concert itself was long but worth the length. The group of all women were overall in tune and sang the repertoire musically. The only piece where the tuning was way off was when the contemporary piece called for singing wine glasses which were only audible in the moments when the choir wasn’t singing and often a quarter tone or more off from whatever key the choir was singing in. Aside from this awkwardness when everyone could tell it wasn’t working, the selection of pieces was ethereal. If you want to hear any of them, you can click on the video below and also listen online to The Virgin Martyrs by Samuel Barber, Hymns from the Rig Veda by Gustav Holst, Sequenza II for harp. The harpist was outstanding. Josefien de Waele. She was playing on most of the pieces and her solos were the most moving to me.
This concert and meeting Martijn and talking with him as a fellow musician was a wonderful ending to the day and I hurried back to the hotel on my sore feet, eager for a good night’s sleep.
Day 6 - Boat Ride, Hamlet as part of the Holland Festival at the International Theater, random conversations
This morning I knew right where to go to jump on the beautiful boat I had ridden yesterday and this time, Elena wasn’t there but a terrific guide named Abel was on board with the captain at the rudder, Pascal. There was only one other person on board and I don’t know why this boat isn’t the one everyone wants to be taking since you can hop on and off at several stops for 24 hours and it is open air and electric and the guides actually talk with you and answer questions unlike the many commercial boats I saw. Abel explained the history of many of the sites we passed and I rode it to Centraal Station then back on the circuit and got off near where the play was that I was seeing at 2 PM. Below is Abel and images from the boat. You can see it was glorious weather.
The highlight of the rest of the day was the two hour performance (no intermission) of a modern rendition of Hamlet, all in French with English subtitles and performed in the modern era and directed by Christiane Jatahy. It was electrifying - acting, the staging, the chemistry between the actors, the way they used iphone video projections on stage with eachother to amplify the actors faces. To read the program and analysis if you’re interested, you can see it here: https://indd.adobe.com/view/85d28b42-e866-4199-98a2-f8d95a4d0d29 and listen to the woman who plays Hamlet in this interview about Jatahy’s interpretation and her own interpretation of Hamlet https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/affaires-culturelles/christiane-jatahy-est-l-invitee-d-affaires-culturelles-5024410
For the first time, I felt I could understand the humanity in Hamlet and follow the dialogue and understand exactly what was happening, in addition to realizing that this was not purely Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Parts were removed and parts were added, but overall the plot happened as in the original play. The sets and lighting were a compelling mix of videos projected onto a scrim, the scrim pulled down occasionally to reveal the actors with no overlay and then a wall behind the actors of mirros which also reflected the audience dimly and which occasionally had silhouettes of trees in a field at dusk. It was brilliant and everyone gave a standing ovation at the end. And the rest of the night was really nothing compared to this show. It’s my last night and I’m ready to explore the UK. Heading there tomorrow via train and spending a night near Paddington Station. Goodnight!
