(Monday, Sept. 28) Since our hotel was only a block away from Amsterdam’s famous Van Gogh museum, we felt we ought to make the short pilgrimage this morning before the place got too crowded. Big mistake.
Just before we reached the museum’s door, a large tour group beat us to the punch. It took a while for the museum to sort out the group’s entry while we standing behind them in line twiddling our thumbs.
Van Gogh’s most important works are hung on one floor of the museum beginning with his earliest paintings through his last. Good news and bad. The good news is that this allows one to see how his work evolved over time as me moved from Holland, to Paris, to Provence, and finally, to the north of France where he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The bad news is that most of these paintings are relatively small and one has to stand quite close to them to view and study them, a difficult task when the museum is stuffed to the rafters with visitors.
In fits of exasperation, we jumped the time-line forward and back, then finally gave up and took an early lunch in the museum’s café to see if the crowds would thin out by 12:30 or so. This proved to be a wise move as the tour groups had apparently left to dine elsewhere, and even though patrons were still arriving, it became much easier to linger in front of a particular painting and imagine the effort Van Gogh put into producing it. Although Van Gogh produced something like 800 or so paintings (plus sketches and etchings) during his relatively brief time as a full-time painter (1884-1890), the Amsterdam museums’ collection on display does not appear to be that large.
The top floor of the museum displays correspondence between Van Gogh and his artist friends, as well as paintings they did of each other. To me, this was actually a more interesting part of the Van Gogh presentation that the major works done by the artist himself.
Later in the afternoon we took in the exhibit of work done by one of Van Gogh’s contemporaries, Alfred Stevens, who painted ladies of Parisian society in settings such as their boudoirs and with their children. In the past, women had been chiefly portrayed in paintings based on Biblical or mythological stories, so Stevens’ work was somewhat radical. Yet he became a famous and success painter at an early age, and outlived Van Gogh by many years.
Although the day began with an abundance of sunshine, clouds filled the sky by the time we left the Van Gogh museum in mid-afternoon to return to the street market we’d visited with our tour guide, Albert, on Saturday, so I could take some photos of that “locals mainly” scene. The market was less crowded than on the weekend, and some of the merchants looked quite bored since sales were probably slow.
After leaving the market, we caught Tram #3 and got off a few blocks from our hotel to check out restaurants that our innkeeper, Hans, had recommended. We made a reservation at “Bouf” to dine at 7:30, and then walked back to the hotel to relax a bit before returning for dinner.
For the first time during our trip, we enjoyed dishes in the “California Cuisine” genre¸ and the first course of pumpkin soup reminded us that Summer ended a week ago and that Winter wouldn’t be long in coming to Amsterdam.
