Amsterdam Art

Amsterdam has two main art museums. Janet and Jeff along with Barbara and Jake saw the van Gogh museum Thursday morning. Judy and I went to the van Gogh museum in the afternoon. Van Gogh painted in the 1880s and used many different colors and brushstrokes to paint landscapes and people. His father was a pastor in a very poor village, and he studied to be a pastor himself and his first posting was to poor coal miners in a part of Belgium where they were destitute and very hard worked as though they were slaves. he apparently decided to become a painter to show people, the beauty of the world, and of people themselves in a world that is filled with trouble and difficult living conditions. Very few of his paintings were sold during his life and his sister in law after his death promoted his work with gallery showings and he became very popular among artists in the early 1900s. During his last summer, he painted in a French Village and painted a painting each day for 75 days. I wondered what would be on display if someone made a museum for my life? There might be a room for each of my major projects and reports with color graphs, but the best part of my museum would be the stories of you kids and your families-our 15 grand children and their young lives. I didn’t make beautiful paintings, but you are wonderful treasures that have filled our lives- you are our greatest blessings from God. Jesus wondered what would be in our life museums when he asked us “where is your treasure?”

  

Van Gogh knew God’s word

 

Colorful countyside

 

Famous for painting sunflowers

 

Lilies from the garden

 

The resurrection of Lazarus

Self portrait of Vincent van Gogh

On Saturday after our breakfast, the six of us went to the Rijks museum, and saw paintings and other art pieces, including furniture, and ceramics from Dutch artists. The most well-known artists are Rembrandt and Vermeer, but there are many great artist from the Netherlands. After three hours of looking at paintings, and listening to the audio guide, we stopped for a very nice lunch in the Museum Cafe. We had toured the second floor, with paintings from the 1600’s, and didn’t have a chance to see the paintings, furniture and decorative items from later centuries- perhaps we’ll come again for a third time to see more art in Amsterdam.

Lots of the paintings were portraits

 

Model of a sturdy Dutch ship

Many paintings were of major ship battles

Family portrait playing music together 

Delft Blue ceramics imitated Chinese porcelain 

Winter fun in Netherlands- but too cold for me

We walked back to our hotel and took taxis to our ship, the Viking Bragi. We had a safety drill reporting to our emergency stations in our life jackets, and later had our first delicious dinner in the dining room-tables of 6 or 8 with white tablecloths and lots of silverware- very fancy. River cruise number two has begun!

Amsterdam Again

This is our second visit to Amsterdam. Amsterdam was constructed around 4 main canals that are semicircular (half of target bulls eye). The distinctive narrow houses with triangle and other shaped facades were built along both sides of the canals. We visited a couple of the canal houses on our first visit and we visited two on this visit. We’re staying at a hotel near the two main museums, the Rijks museum and the van Gogh art museum.

On Thursday after we greeted Janet and Jeff and Barbara and Jake arriving at the hotel at about noon we visited a canal house.

Fancy canal house that was two plots wide

Canal house interior was built to impress guests

Canal bridges are not very high

Dinner together (all six of us) at a local cafe on Thursday 

On Friday morning, we visited a second canal house that we had also visited 10 years ago. This canal house was the home of art collectors who had no children and so they left the house to the city of Amsterdam as a museum in about 1920. The house was used as an art institute and during the war by resistance groups to print false ration cards and identification cards for people hiding from the Nazis. There was lots of resistance in the Netherlands to the Nazis. They were occupied and oppressed, and most people wanted no part of the Nazi empire that was spreading through all of Europe. 

Judy on a canal bridge with bright flowers 

Judy in front of yellow china cabinet

Beautiful bedroom in the canal house

Another room full of furniture and art

Because we were on a late schedule, we made sandwiches at breakfast and ate our lunch in front of the Van Gogh Museum that we were scheduled to visit at 2 pm. The other two couples had visited the museum in the morning, and we saw them as they were going to the tram to go to the Anne Frank house. We crossed paths in Amsterdam.

Who have you crossed paths with lately? 

Second River Cruise

 This is our second river cruise, but this time we’re traveling with Judy‘s two sisters; Barbara, and Jake and Janet and Jeff. We are traveling from Amsterdam to Budapest on the grand European tour with Viking. Judy and I left Sacramento on Monday and arrived Tuesday at noon. We slept for four hours in our hotel room and went to the Ann Frank house. It is hard to imagine the horror of those years during the second world war when the Nazis had taken over Netherlands and were hunting down Jewish families and many other people to send them to work camps and concentration camps. Many people in the Netherlands resisted the Nazis and some hid the Jews and other people scheduled to go to work camps. Ann Frank’s journals give a vivid picture of those terrible times. What would you have done?

 

The canals of Amsterdam are very picturesque. 

This was the Frank’s warehouse with several rooms hidden upstairs behind a bookcase.

On Wednesday, we went to Haarlem to visit the Corrie Ten Boom house where their family hid Jews and young men and students who were resisting being sent to work camps in Germany. Haarlem is an old city with a very large church and canals and a working windmill that was recently reconstructed. We had a great day seeing the town of Haarlem with beautiful weather. We first visited the Tyler museum, who was a man who wanted to give an opportunity for people to study science and art. He left his fortune with 5 friends to build a Museum and Laboratory and art studio after he died in 1890, since he had no children.

The Tyler museum physics laboratory had lots of early electricity apparatus for experiments 

The Tyler art gallery allowed young artists to study the old masters and their drawings.

Here is an old decorative building.

Here is a really big organ with 5,000 pipes. You can borrow the CD that I bought of baroque music played on this church organ.

We went inside this recently constructed wooden windmill that can be turned to face the wind. 

The Modern craftsmen use wooden ship building techniques. The Dutch people built very sturdy ships. The windmill is on top of the brick house to raise it to better catch the wind.

Our canal boat ride in Haarlem was relaxing.

The captain directed us to an Indonesian restaurant, because Indonesia was a Dutch colony. We rode the train back to Amsterdam, and a tram back to our hotel. This was a great first day of our second river cruise adventure.