Kuiperijmuseum

Today was the day we’d been planning for half a year. Teresa had bought tickets for the Johannes Vermeer exhibit back in September. This widely publicized show is at the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands. We’d read articles and watched videos and documentaries to learn about Vermeer and about the 150-year-old museum itself. A documentary from our Berkeley library chronicles the 10-year, over-budget renovation of the museum from 2003 to 2013. A significant reason for the delayed re-opening was due to a controversy over whether the bike and pedestrian path under the museum would remain open. At one point the museum director remarked, “I am more busy with cyclists than with Rembrandt.”

Now, back to 2023. The exhibition was billed as the largest ever collection of Vermeer paintings in one show. Through a series of international loans, the museum is exhibiting around 27 of the 37 known paintings. All we can say is it lived up to the hype. We’re glad we got an initial orientation to ALL of his known paintings (in prints) at the museum in Delft, two days earlier. It gave us a chance to study some of our favorites and identify features pointed out at Delft.

Amsterdam native Rembrandt, is also heavily featured in the Rijksmuseum, and we saw some wonderful works of his, along with other Dutch Masters’ works. There are also two impeccably decorated doll’s houses, using authentic materials and precise proportions.

After all that culture, we decided to take advantage of another sunny (and slightly less cool) day and rent bikes for the afternoon. M & T have their own bikes, of course. In about 10 minutes we were out of the city and riding in the Amsterdamse Bos (forest/woods), which is really a large park with great bike paths and many recreational activities, including a little farm. After a couple of hours we arrived at Molen van Sloten, a working drainage windmill, and we happened to be just in time for a really informative tour. Many parts of the Netherlands are below sea level (including the international airport, at 6 meters below!), so windmills are still used to pump water out of the buildable land area and out to the sea by way of canals. Our guide, Olaf, was one of the operators of the windmill.

On the bike ride home, during the commute hours, we got to live like the locals and dodge trucks parked in the bike lanes, pedestrians, mass quantities of cyclists and cars trying to use the bike lanes as traffic work-arounds. We handled it with aplomb!Read more