The Flower Market in Amsterdam

On Saturday the weather was cool and gray with a little bit of rain--a perfect museum day.  So I went to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum and the Hermitage.  The famous Hermitage museum in Russia has so many works of art that it can afford to set up "outposts" in cities like Amsterdam and send a new traveling exhibition every few months.  On the way to the Hermitage, I walked by the bloemen markt, the outdoor flower market along the Singel canal.

Even though spring is just starting to come to the Netherlands, the flower market already had an amazing array of cut flowers and potted bulbs like these blue and white hyacinths.

Flowers are pretty inexpensive in Holland where there are acres and acres of tulip fields to pick them from.  The bloemen markt is geared towards tourists, with wooden shoes and ceramic windmills for sale alongside the bulbs, but fifty tulips for 8.50 euros still seems like a pretty amazing deal to me!

 Daffodils are some of the earliest bulbs to bloom in the spring.

There were amaryllis bulbs, and ...

All sorts of other unusual bulbs.

Close by the flower market there is a nineteenth-century Jesuit church dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to Japan and India who died en route to China.  Mass was starting in half and hour, and so the church was open, and I got to look around a little bit.  It is one of the most fabulous Neo-Gothic church interiors I've ever seen.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth century there was a revival of interest not only in Gothic art and architecture but also in the "medieval craftsman."  Rejecting the increasing reliance on machines and factory production in the Industrial Revolution, Neo-Gothic artists tried to be "medieval" by painstakingly doing their work by hand--even hand painting wallpaper designs.  In this tradition, the walls of St. Francis Xavier's are all hand painted to look like tapestries, and the church is filled with colorful statues in elaborate Gothic niches.  In a way, I think it helps you imagine what a Gothic sanctuary might have looked like before the centuries weathered everything into gray, chipped stone.

The Hermitage is in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.  During the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was extremely tolerant of most religions, and so many Jews sought refuge in Holland.  Rembrandt lived in this Jewish part of town, and he used many Jews as models for his paintings of Christ--very unusual for the time.  The Jewish population was tragically and dramatically decimated after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.  The odd dedication of this Catholic church to Moses and Aaron recalls the heavy Jewish presence once in this area.

The Rijksmuseum is in the southern part of the city.  It was pretty dramatic to watch it slowly take shape out of the mist as I walked toward it.

There was a long line in the rain to get in, but it's worth it to see Vermeer and Rembrandt's work in person!