Day 3
Thursday, April 8, 2010
There were too many highlights today, and it’s hard to single out the second-best moment. Was it the train ride south to the Hague, the countryside rolling by as we wrote postcards in the flashing sunlight? The splendid Maritshuis museum, with its brilliant focus on the best of the classical Dutch masters, the crème de la crème—or, better still, the utter thrill of seeing Girl with a Pearl Earring in person, that illuminated, unreadable expression and the simplicity of the portraiture? Perhaps it was the serene little plaza just northwest of the museum, the wide cobbled avenue shaded in tall trees, a thin, bent old man with cropped hair and a long, straight beard dragged across his chest as he stood with his cane to walk through the crowds of restless pigeons. Or the fantastic Escher museum just off the plaza, with its quirky and unexplained crystal chandeliers in all conceivable shapes, from pipes and umbrellas to sharks and eagles to bombs and skulls. Or better still the Escher sketches and prints themselves, virtually every major, recognizable work collected in one place, including the self-portrait in a sphere, the two hands drawing each other, the “Day and Night” tessellation, lizards crawling off their page and over a stack of books, the infinite staircase and the impossible waterfall, the optical illusions…. It might even have been the large woodcut print of Escher’s wife, the lines fine and open and lovingly wrought in her face, the attention to detail and the care in execution belying Escher’s devotion to his lovely wife.
But each of these, if it could beat out the others, would still be only the second-best experience. That pride of place belongs to the morning, which Jennifer and I spent in the Central Bureau for Genealogy, attached to the National Archives in The Hague. There, we worked with a man named Spaans to research my family history, and we found records related to the birth, marriage, and/or death of every major direct ancestor going back five generations, including my great-great-grandfather’s parents, his siblings, and his in-laws. The biggest thrill of all, though, was rooting through the archive files, turning over page after page of newspaper announcements, birthday cards, shipping documents, and census records and then discovering my own grandfather’s name: almost 30 years ago, he’d written to this same Bureau asking for information on his grandfather, and suddenly today, in my hand, I held a mimeographed copy of the Bureau’s response. There was my grandfather’s name, his old address in southeast Texas, a description of his request, and the lengthy and detailed reply full of information about my great-great grandfather—my own grandfather’s grandfather. I literally went cold, as though for a second not only my heart but even my blood had stopped, the circulation arrested in my veins, nothing capable of moving in this split-second echo of history.
I called my grandfather this evening to tell him the news. He remembers the letter I found. “Oh yes,” he said. “Did you give them my regards?” I assured him that I had, and that the man Spaans was glad to hear it. In fact, when we pointed out to Spaans the weird historical ripple—my grandfather’s letter—he smiled and said, “There you go, then—you have all you need to know!”
I do, indeed, have all I need to know, because my grandfather is a meticulous (if sometimes creative) genealogist, and he’d complied all this information long before me and without the benefit of being in The Netherlands—he did everything by hand and by mail! But it was fantastically exhilarating to be tracing his research myself, to put my hands on the actual records he’d long ago got copies of, to be in the country of my ancestors reading the records of my ancestors. I feel a sense of place, of pride, here: When I told Spaans my own last name, he chuckled and repeated, “Snoek—yes, that’s a very Dutch name!” I felt a similar sense of pride in my Scottish heritage when we visited the Fraser gravesite on the battlefield at Culloden, and a similar sense of personal connection when we visited my dear great-aunt Flora and looked through her old photo albums. But here, I am in my father’s father’s father’s homeland, myself in name removed from the Snoeks of Holland by only two generations. The experiences here still me, both in the sense that I am arrested by them and that I am serene within them.
My great-grandfather was born in this country and shared his memories with his children; my grandfather shared the history with his children and grandchildren, and my great-uncles were able to return to this land and walk the earth of their father. But my grandfather and my father have not been able to come here, so I feel like their own arm lent down the generations and stretched across the ocean: I am touching this land for them, and in turn I can tell the generations to come of our homeland, I can pass down the tales with first-hand details (and, because I’m a Snoek, perhaps a few embellishments) until some future descendant can one day make the journey and touch our land again. In this way, our connection to the past is never broken, and I am both proud and thrilled to be a part of that.
11:15 pm
Day 4
Friday, April 9, 2010
Today was a deliciously lazy day, though we hadn’t planned it to be that way. We started out with the ambitious mission to do all of the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, each a daunting, full-day adventure. And the Van Gogh Museum was indeed a lengthy exercise in art, with three (and a half) levels of art plus an annex (known locally as “the Mussel” for its shell-like shape) showing a special Gauguin exhibit. We got the audio tour on a whim, but it turned out to be excellent, with some fascinating insights, cool multimedia displays, and a whole separate section linking Van Gogh’s extensive letters to the artwork. In fact, that was probably the coolest part of the museum experience: The curators have organized the museum chronologically, arguing visually that Van Gogh was not the frenetic, spontaneous, violently independent artist popular culture has made him out to be, but instead was a serious student of his craft, a man who set himself a course of progress in his art and pursued it diligently and with great purpose. The layout of the exhibit showed not only the progress of his talent and skill but also the direction of his study and the minor “courses” he set for himself, such as studies in stippling or a period mimicking Japanese painting. To complement the visual argument, they have exhaustively culled Van Gogh’s thousands of letters, finding references to artistic craft or to specific paintings in progress and analyzing his comments for evidence of purpose in his study and his work. They portray Van Gogh as a troubled but dedicated artist desperate to express a clear, personal vision independent of traditional schools of painting but also desperate for community in art, a man possessed of the need for company, for critique, for influence and audience. The museum makes a compelling case, and their presentation makes the whole museum experience a brilliant, breathtaking tour through art.
Not that Van Gogh’s paintings needed much help in that area. I went in hoping to see some of his famous self-portraits (I did) and the haunting Wheatfield with Crows, but I was surprised to discover some other emotional areas in his painting. His sunflowers are, in person, more melancholy that I had expected, their somber yellows and ochers darkened by the story of why Van Gogh painted them: He had displayed a sunflower painting in Paris, and heard that Gauguin had praised the work; when he finally convinced Gauguin to join him in Arles to live and paint as the founders of an artists’ colony, he painted a slurry of sunflowers, including his most famous ones, to decorate the small studio, only to have them all roundly dismissed by Gauguin and to see them become the subject of occasional taunting from Gauguin. (The museum, displaying their Van Gogh bias, does not cast Gauguin in a very favorable light, though even reading between the lines, I have to admit he seems to have been a bit of a bully.)
The other surprise was a vivid painting of almond blossoms, the thin tree branches winding merrily through a deep, rich blue sky, the brush strokes masterful and delicate, not at all the energetic desperation in some of Van Gogh’s more famous paintings. It’s a troubling work, because on first glance it seems so bright and happy, so full of natural beauty, of hope and promise. And indeed Van Gogh painted it for his infant nephew, first son of his brother Theo; he writes in letters of the hope and cheerfulness he wants to share with the boy. But the longer you look at the painting, the darker the sky seems, the more distant its depth, the less natural its light. Something feels wrong: it’s too emotional, perhaps, too emphatic. It’s as though Van Gogh himself weren’t quite convinced of the hope and happiness he wanted to convey, as though he’s painting the image to force those emotions into his own life. It’s a disturbing but powerful piece, and for its complexity, it is a new addition to my favorites.
After lunch at the museum café, we strolled up the plein to the Rijksmuseum, wondering how we were going to fit in everything with only a handful of hours left in the Rijksmuseum’s daily schedule. The guide books all mention the extent and variety in the collection, with whole wings each on Dutch history, foreign collections, sculpture, prints, and Asiatic art, as well as wings for 17th century painting, 18th and 19th century painting, and the Hague School. However, the museum building is currently undergoing restoration (as is every major landmark in the city, it seems), so to accommodate the construction and protect the art, the museum has had to drastically reduce its exhibition. Most of the former wings are condensed to single rooms of selected highlights, and some sections (like the Asiatic art, which I was looking forward to) have been cut entirely. The truncation was a slight disappointment, I admit, but in the end it turned out to be a good length, because we were in and out of the museum in about 90 minutes, leaving us plenty of the afternoon to relax. Plus, the museum continues (wisely) to display their most popular and prized paintings, including their handful of exquisite Vermeers, which was of course the highlight of the museum for Jennifer and me. I don’t like to jump on bandwagons with art—I like the popular stuff but I look for the less popular, and on this trip Jennifer and I both became new fans of the saucy Jan Steen—but when it comes to Vermeer, the celebrated works truly are the best. I enjoyed the quiet tone of the muted Woman Reading a Letter, for instance, but The Kitchen Maid is absolutely breathtaking, and despite the two and a half rooms of Rembrandts and his gigantic and much touted The Night Watch, for Jennifer and me, The Kitchen Maid stole the show.
So once we’d seen it, it was easy to walk back out into the sunshine fully satisfied, and we felt so good about our newly open afternoon that we decided to while away the last of the warm sunlight eating waffles and ice cream at a café in the plein, pigeons dancing on the few empty tables while teenagers flirted in the distance and, just on the other side of the outdoor seating area, a group of street musicians set up and began a lively jazz number. We finished our treat and sat sipping coffee in the breeze, then when the lead horn player began weaving into the tables with a cup for tips, we dropped a few euros in his cup and strolled home. We wanted to drop off souvenirs and regroup before our scheduled canal cruise—our second, but this one by candlelight through the city at night.
Halfway through the tour, we all hopped off the boat and made our way through the narrow city-center streets to a popular Dutch pub, The Old Sailor, for a complementary sample of jenever, the original Dutch gin from which all other gins derive. It bears much more of the juniper-berry flavor and seems to pack a stronger punch, but it was a delicious end to our evening, and after we made it back to the boat, Jennifer and I sat back for a leisurely canal ride home, wandered back up to our B&B, and now I find myself too tired to write more.
Not too tired. Not exhausted or weary. Too… complete. Today was a full and, in my book, a perfect day.
11:43 pm
Samuel Snoek-Brown 