Rijksmuseum

When I was in Amsterdam, I also went to the Rijksmuseum--the National Museum of the Netherlands.  I wasn't sure what it would be like since they are in the middle of a massive renovation project and a lot of the museum is shut down as a result.  But, I could use my Museum Card to get in and I figured it was worth a couple of hours.  It was a lot of fun.  I am pretty fond of Dutch painting so I thought that it was a really worthwhile trip.  They also had fairly cheap audio guides on different themes that had a lot of information on them.  I didn't figure out how to work mine until I was about half-way through the museum so I backtracked a bit so that I could get my money's worth out of it.

I looked up the Museum website and, like the Van Gogh Museum, they have a really excellent online presentation.  They have a program where, if you have "Quicktime" on your computer, you can do a virtual tour of some of the different exhibits.  It takes a little while to load (and I always have to give permission for some reason) but it is pretty interesting and you can get a pretty good look at some of the pictures.  You can see it here and can see displays on the Dutch Republic, World Power, Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.

If you go to this link, you can see even more detail about certain things.  There are detailed explanations of various paintings, including The Nightwatch which is one of the most famous paintings in the Museum (it has a whole gallery devoted just to it), the fabulous dollhouses which were made to represent and mimic the actual homes of the adult women who commissioned them, some of the really beautiful silver work for which the Netherlands was famous, and even the specifics about some particular Delft tiles that were made for special occaisions.  Most of the information is in English, although there are a few things in Dutch.  It is really simple to look through and it is a lot of fun.  Most of the picture have extra information if you run the cursor across the screen.

If you go here, you can look at paintings by early Dutch painters, organized by artist.  You can zoom in on the pictures but most of the information about them is in Dutch.

There is a new display that has been put up since I went called "Ottomania. The Turkish world through Western eyes."  It looks interesting--it commemorates 400 years of diplomacy between the Netherlands and Turkey--but what is especially interesting is that they have a short video about the exhibit.  (As a word of warning, there is a line drawing of a nursing mother at the beginning.)  What I noticed, though, is that I could barely understand a word of what the presenter was saying (it is given in Dutch, with English subtitles).  Having been spoiled by living in Rotterdam (which is generally considered to have the epitome of precise, dialect-free, accent-less Dutch) I really have a hard time recognizing what is being said.

There is also a display that I saw which is not there now.  A piece of an English ship, captured by the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch war, has been sent (temporarily) to England, to be displayed at the National Maritime Museum in London.  (See the information here.  And you can see a picture of the piece, itself, if you want, on the front page of the museum website or in the 360 degree tour of the "Dutch Republic" room.)  The Dutch hero who captured "the pride of the English fleet" was called Michiel de Ruyter.  The video below (which comes from Wikipedia Commons and the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) is from a 1957 reconstruction of de Ruyter's victorious return to Amsterdam.  De Ruyter is so popular that, at least according to Dutch Wikipedia, a new film is being made about him, to be released next year.  

There is a museum extension at Schipol (the Airport in Amsterdam) but it is inside passport control, which means, I assume, that you can only visit the museum if you are flying somewhere.  It is, however, free and it has got to be a way better use of a two hour wait than reading trashy magazines.  They have what sounds like a really interesting exhibit on Dutch Winters right now but it ends a couple of days before Jael gets here, so I can't even commission her to go and check it out for me.  I had never heard of airport museums until the Air and Space Museum moved out to Dulles but I suppose, in an airport, you almost have a guaranteed audience.

One of the best things in the museum was a display about an Arctic expidition that the Dutch sent out in 1596.  Apparently one of the survivors wrote and illustrated his recollections and the museum displayed some of the old pages from those books.  It was a tragic story and involved many, many polar bear attacks (I imagine that none of those folks would have been touched by that picture of a lonely polar bear floating on a chunk of ice).  They were trying to find a passage somewhere (or something like that) and got stuck and wrecked in the ice.  First they stuck around the ship for a while and then there was a polar bear attack (and the story is accompanied by drawings of polar bears crawling all over the wrecked ship and tearing men apart).  Then they went and dug a tiny hole in the ground with a cover on top and they huddled in there all winter.  They dug other holes to trap foxes, for food, but then the polar bears came again.  Some of the guys went to gather wood from the broken-up ship to make a boat in which to escape, and then the polar bears came again.  Eventually, in the spring, a tiny handful of men escaped, being chased to their boat by ravenous polar bears.  It was a very dramatic story and they stopped being worried about finding that passage.

The expedition was led by Willem Barentsz, a famous Dutch explorer, and, if you go here you can see a Wikipedia article on Barentsz which includes some of the illustrations which were on display at the museum.  Apparently it was during this voyage that folks first realized that polar bear liver was toxic.