Bad and Good News

The Rijksmuseum is the number one art museum in the Netherlands and art lovers cannot afford to miss it. The museum possesses an unrivalled collection of Dutch art but the bad news is that the museum is closed for renovations. It was supposed to reopen in spring 2009, but this was not feasible and its reopening is now scheduled for 2012 /2013. The good news is that the Philips Wings stayed open with the exhibition Meesterwerken, Masterpieces.

Rijksmuseum

 I visted the museum last week and every single exhibit is a true masterpiece. I wandered through fourteen rooms and admired four hundred masterpieces. I spent two hours at the exhibition and did not regret that the fourteen rooms were only one-tenth of the museum’s available space. Actually, I quite liked the shrunken collection, because only the very best works are on display.

I joined the Rembrandt fans in front of the Night Watch. He was the first painter to depict members of the militia actively doing things. One of the men is cleaning and another inspecting his riffle.

I shifted from one master to another from Rembrandt to Vermeer to Jan Steen. All paintings have been meticulously cleaned. The now vivid colours seem just to be dry. Every touch of the brush is visible. Most paintings in the collection were commissioned by wealthy merchants to adorn the walls of their private homes. That’s why you will see hardly any religious subjects.

My two favourite paintings in this exhibition are from Gerard Bicker, a relatively unknown artist. He painted Bartholomeus van Helst senior and junior. The father is dressed in black with a white millstone collar and looks stern. His twenty-year old son, double-chinned and indolent is dressed in salmon, pearl-grey and gold-beige. His dress style accentuates the generation gap, like it does today. Nothing much has changed over the ages.

If you want to see the splendour of a 17th century canal house, climb three steps so that your eyes are level with the interior of the dolls house. Dolls houses were not children’s toys, but a hobby and pasttime of the lady of the house.

Another showpiece is a cabinet Amalia van Solms wife of Stadtholder Fredrik Hendrik, commissioned after her husband’s death in 1647. Inlaid ivory and tortoise shell sprigs of orange blossom refer to his name Van Oranje Nassau. Inside the cabinet are her and her husband’s intitials. I liked the curator’s decision to keep the doors of the cabinet closed and not show this intimicy to the public.

The eye-catcher in the Delftware room is a huge flower vase in the form of a stacked obelisk with holes to put flowers in. Decorating rooms with scented flowers had become very trendy in the 17th century. This had never been done before and therefore flower holders had to be designed. Buy a cardboard fold-it-yourself flower holder in the Museum Shop and decorate your house with scented flowers or better still buy tulip bulbs, grow your own and stick colourful tulips in the holes.

If you don’t have the opportunity to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, part of the collection is on loan to other museums. So watch out for the Dutch masters on tour.

Rijksmuseum, Jan Luijkenstraat 1

Opening hours: every day from 09.00 – 18.00, Fridays until 20.30

Entrance € 11, under eighteen free.