The three Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum and their many visitors
Art library at the Rijksmuseum
Screaming baby face at the museum
Boat jam on an Amsterdam canal
More Amsterdam pigeons
More Amsterdam street performers
We slept well even above the very busy intersection that we look down on from our fourth-floor hotel room, and I went to chair a conference panel first thing. It was fun, but at 8:45 our audience was pretty small, probably about 10 people. It had been raining when we got up, but by the time I came out at 10:30, it was sunny and we walked to Amsterdam’s giant Dutch-art museum, the Rijksmuseum, and spent the rest of the morning there. I am happy we went, because seeing the three Vermeers that are currently there (the fourth is on loan to the museum in Delft) was worth it–seeing how small they are, and how many visitors they attract. They have the Milkmaid, Woman Reading a Letter, and The Love Letter, which I hadn’t looked at closely before, but which features the yellow coat with the ermine border). We also saw the Night Watch by Rembrandt with a whole bunch of other people crowding around, and some other famous paintings by Rembrandt, de Hooch, and others. The building, from the 1880s, is really interesting and has a wonderful art book library with a very cool design. Outside the museum, in the gardens, there was also an interesting display of tree sculptures by an Italian artist named Guiseppe Penone (trees cast in bronze “holding” huge rocks, a tree upside down, and a tree struck by lightning where all the split inside part was covered in gold leaf). But overall, I have to say I was a bit disappointed–the choice to have primarily Dutch art on display makes sense, but then there is so much that isn’t here, but in other Amsterdam museums (and this is not a museum trip, because the outdoor views of Amsterdam are so great that they absorb all my attention). So there are only a couple of VanGoghs, no Breughels, and only a very few 20th-century Dutch artists. We are still toying with the idea of going to a Banksy exhibit that opens Saturday, but the fact that it’s opening day (and, as all Dutch museums, exorbitantly priced) is pretty daunting.
We spent a little bit of time on the big Museum Square with all its people and more street musicians (the talent varies), but then had lunch in a slightly quieter street cafe–Mark finally tried the famous Dutch pancakes (his was a pancake Hawaii–they are really like German pancakes, right between a crepe and a “fat” American pancake) and I had a simple toasted sandwich (a tosti) and mini pancakes with Dutch-style syrup (also a familiar German taste–made from beet sugar and not at all like maple syrup) for a dessert. We headed back (about ⅔ of a mile from the Rijksmuseum and rested up a little bit before I went to a conference keynote and another panel. Mark picked me up and we headed for one of those take-out noodle places to grab a couple of boxes of noodles with chicken and teriyaki sauce, and we ate those on the big Dam square on the steps of the National Monument, which Mark keeps calling the “phallic monument.” Since people always crack jokes about the shape of the Capitol building in Lincoln, I guess every city has its own penis-shaped structure… We walked the city for another couple of hours, mostly exploring the western edge of the city center, across the many canals that form rings around it–Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht, and Prinsengracht, where the Westerkerk and the Anne Frank house are. The lines were long at the Anne Frank house, where daytime visitors only get in with online tickets, and another “shift” from 5-7:30 is for people who line up. I went to see the house many years ago in my teens, with my dad, and didn’t feel the need to go back and see it again, but it surprised me that I did not remember at all that there was a modern structure built to house the exhibit that leads to the “Achterhuis” / the back house where the Franks were hiding. We headed back to the hotel around 10–given how close we are to midsummer, it was still bright daylight outside then, but I am really enjoying that.