The Rijksmuseum

Thank goodness we’ve got some sunshine today. Yesterday was so dark, all day long, that you needed the lights on all day. I think it was probably the darkest day I can ever remember. However, today the skies are blue, even if the wind is once more whistling around & battering the house.

Regular readers will know, our main reason for going to Amsterdam was to see some more Rembrandt  after seeing the “Flight to Egypt” in Tours – we hadn’t realised at the time of booking that there was going to be exhibition on at the National Gallery in London this winter.

So, on our free day, we headed for the Rijksmuseum. If we saw nothing else, we were determined to get there. It’s an enormous place. We didn’t see it all by any means.

After our experience in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris when we nearly gave up before we got to the Impressionist section we’d really wanted to see, this time we headed straight for the Rembrandt.

One room is dominated by “The Night Watch”. I hadn’t realised it was so enormous. Within the room were various works by contemporaries on a similar theme.

It suddenly struck me these paintings were really the equivalent of the school photo/ works photo/ club photo for a day before the invention of the camera & film.

It also made you realise the greatness of Rembrandt. His characters seemed so much more distinctive, more alive (except for the dog on the bottom right, though that may have been a result of the vandalism done on the painting a while back). It also made you realise why some people would have been reluctant to employ him as a portraitist. He’s too honest. Oliver Cromwell may have wanted to be painted “warts & all” but few others do. Most of us want to be flattered a bit. The Franz Hals painting on a similar theme was certainly more flattering.

In the Rijksmuseum, in most rooms, they provided large cards drawing out various characteristics, & their significance, of the main painting in the room. I thought they were very illuminating, making you aware of things you maybe wouldn’t notice otherwise.

We went on to a few more rooms. We were struck by how impressed we are by Vermeer. We first discovered him as an artist when we visited the Mauritshuis gallery in the Hague nearly ten years ago to see “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” as part of our Pearl Wedding Anniversary celebration.

After several hours the Fox’s feet told us the time had come to once more venture out in the cold & explore more of Amsterdam itself.

We were disappointed that none of the Rembrandt had inspired us as much as the “Flight to Egypt” that we’d seen in Tours. Maybe the fact we weren’t expecting to come across the latter gave it an extra frisson. In Amsterdam we went expecting to be wowed. Or maybe some of Rembrandt’s more interesting works had been loaned to the National Museum in London. However, we felt pleased & satisfied to have been.