If you want a quiet night’s sleep, stay in de Pijp. It is like a tomb here. Until the sun comes up and the birds start
twittering. It’s funny because this is a
densely-populated area, built in the 19th c. as cheap housing for workers. Now it is becoming gentrified, there are
singles and families here, and of course five hundred million bikes. But it remains extremely quiet at night, at
least on Rustenberg Straat.
The Rijksmuseum is the Louvre of Holland, so of course if you are
here you have to go. It is quite grand, and as crowded as you might
expect. The big draw is the aptly-named
Hall of Honour, where the big guns of Dutch painting hang: Hals, Bols, Steen, Vermeer, and of course,
Rembrandt. The centerpiece is R’s Nightwatch,
a massive painting of a civic guard, in which R strayed from the usual more
static depictions of such groups to show this crowd all busily engaged in some action. They’re all milling about as militia do, and it
is, in fact, a day-scene but the painting had darkened so over time that people
just started to assume it was all taking place at night. Now it is has been cleaned, and you can see
the sunshine. All the Rembrandt-iana is
on display in this picture: the
charmingly intimate portraiture, fancy brush work, movement, light used to
highlight important people, and perhaps even the artist himself, peeking out
from behind some guardsman. It is indeed
a worthy centerpiece but I like the quiet little Vermeers myself, as well as
the more Flemish still-lifes with their peel-y lemons and glowing glass.
A conversation while contemplating a painting showing people skating
on a canal:
Me:
The Dutch are famous speed skaters, but you never hear about Dutch ice
hockey. I wonder why that is?
Izzy:
Because they are scared.
Snap!
We spend about three hours working our way through the collection at
the Rijks – which, while it looks like some marvelous Dutch castle of the 17th
c. was in fact only built in the late 19th c.! – ending at this massive Pieneman
about the battle of Waterloo.[1] It is not as masterful as the Nightwatch, but
shares the tropes of a group of men, a lot going on, and maybe night (also
maybe just old and dirty). The moment
depicted is when Wellington hears that the Prussians are coming as reinforcements
and he knows that will turn the tide against the French – they are finis, and
some would say it’s all been downhill for them ever since.
The helpful cards that accompany all the big works in the museum, pointing
out interesting details and making this whole process barely tolerable for the
youngest member of our party, direct us to the hilarious portrait of an
outraged French prisoner down in one corner, who looks like he can’t BELIEVE
that this is happening. See our pix on
the Facebook for that hilarious detail.
Another thing you are supposed to do in A-dam is eat pancakes. Large ones are thin and topped with all
manner of sweet and savory toppings, but the real draw for tourists (because I
can’t believe that locals eat these at any other time than when they have
visiting firemen) are the little puffy ones called poffertjes. They usually come topped with a heavy drift
of powdered sugar and a large pat of butter.
They are exactly the same wherever you go, leading us to believe that
there is a central distributor of giant bags of poffertje batter, perhaps even
just piping it in to the myriad pancakeries around town via an underground
tank-and-pipe system. They’re not bad –
once – for a pick-me-up, but try them again, and after a savory pancake for
lunch, and all you will really want to do is take a nap.
When I get back to Cambridge I am eating nothing but green vegetables
for a week. Maybe even raw ones.
The poffertje-coma hits me in full force at the Stejdelik Museum, the
premier contemporary art museum here. It
is quite a collection and big on de Stijl which is the major Dutch art movement
of the 20th c., but all I really want to do is lie down on that big
couch in the main hall and snooze.
We rally with a wander through all nine of the 9 Straatjes, which is
a charming set of streets in the Jordaan district filled with funky shops in
which we make some purchases. We lose
Peter to a meetup with a friend from home for a few hours, but he joins us
again later for a mercifully non-frites-accompanied Japanese dinner.
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