4.1 MET: Amsterdam & Its Museums

I had a 9-hour layover in Amsterdam. The beautiful buildings of Venice of the North is somehow unremarkable and indistinguishable from other northern European cities. The calm and hugging canals, with an air of Germanic seriousness, are not as intimate as those in Venice. It was still a very pleasant walk along Damrak to explore the historical city center.

















However, the highlights of the day are surely the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum.





Under construction until 2010, the Rijksmuseum, nevertheless, still has its best on display: masterpieces from the Golden Age painters Pieter de Hooch, Jan Vermeer, and of course, Rembrandt. Looking at paintings in the textbook and seeing the real frames are two different things. Unlike the overwhelmingly colossal size done by Jacque-Louis David, the Dutch canvases call for close examinations.

The serene scenes of leisurely and well-to-do Bourgeois families presented by de Hooch, as in The Linen Closet, show an orderly urban life style and also set an equally orderly moral tone, a philosophy possibly picked up by the Pre-Raphaelites 200 years later. The carefully arranged signature key-hole perspective invites your imagination to travel beyond the canvas. The exquisite and smooth brush strokes remind me of the clean licked-surface style of the great Ingré.



Another fine example is Mother's Duty.



Vermeer’s maids are seemingly ordinary, themes mundane, and composition simple. But historians argue there are full of religious connotations (possibly the Calvinistic emphasis on daily labor). There are often windows in his paintings, indicating the source of light, with which the painter masterfully rendered the imagery with splendid delicacy and elegance. The Milkmaid on display is truly a tour de force.



I am not familiar with Rembrandt, synonymous to (probably) the greatest painter. With so much hype, I finally got to look at the originals. He is truly a master of drama. The employment of light and stark contrast reminds me of the dramatic compositions by Caravaggio. The limelight is not on (possibly) Prophetess Anna, rather on her book upon which the audience’s center of attention is immediately drawn. Her face, usually the focal point of any portrait, turns sideways, hides in the shade, and remains sketchy at best.



Also seen in Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, the prophet sits inside a cave near the burning city, but the mysterious light from outside the canvas drenches him in golden illumination.



Rembrandt also invented a technique: using the other end of a paintbrush, the tapered wooden end, to scratch the paint. On some of his famous self portraits, I saw this technique in use on the hair area.



On the northwest corner of the beautiful Museumplein, a short 5 minute walk from Rijksmuseum, is Van Gogh Museum, a glassy modern building dedicated to the post impressionist whose significance still confuses me. What is not confusing is that this guy was really a quick learner and good at the fundamentals. On his first ambitious attempt at serious painting, The Potato Eaters, the figures are distorted, light and color depressed, rigid and wood-cut like strokes confined in color blocks. I wasn’t sure whether the artistic disfiguration was conscious. The answer lies in the museum. Van Gogh started learning painting at the age of 27, ten years before he died. He painted The Potato Eaters after 5 years of earnest learning. I saw one of his early portrait studies in the collections. His mastery of form, shape, and proportion is superb. On one of his letters to his brother Theo, he explained his idea of using layers of thick and daring colors on a rice field to express different feelings. So I got my answer.



However, if I had 10 million dollars, I would still prefer Renoir's Theater Box to his Sunflowers.