My Youngest Sister Comes to Holland

At the very end of May, my youngest sister, Rachel, came to see me in the Netherlands.  She had been on a research project in England, and so we arranged for her to hop across the sea, get a whirlwind view of Holland, and then go to Paris together over the Ascension Day holiday.  It was dark and rainy when she arrived, and a broken tram in Amsterdam didn't speed up the long process of finding her hostel!  I had brought her Dutch specialties for a little dinner: Gouda cheese, lemon kwark yogurt, raisin bread with marzipan, and of course a pack of stroopwafels.

She only really had one full day in Holland, but we managed to pack five cities into it!  We started with a walk along Amsterdam's canals with their stately houses from the seventeenth century.  Then went to the hidden garden courtyard in the Begijnhof, and finally walked by the Dam and the Nieuwekerk where the Dutch monarchs are crowned.  This is a picture of Rachel in front of the Royal Palace.

The facade of the palace was all covered in restoration scaffolding until fairly recently.

We got on the train and rode south to Delft.  Here Rachel is in the huge market square between the town hall and the towering Nieuwekerk.

By an amazing old building covered with brightly covered coats of arms, near the convent where William the Silent was murdered.

While we were in Delft I got to visit the chapel of Maria van Jesse where there is a medieval statue of the Virgin and Child believed to be miraculous.  I had seen the image before but hadn't been able to take a picture because there was a priest hearing confession in the chapel, and I thought it was too disrespectful!  This time, though, I got a photograph.  In medieval art the "Tree of Jesse" is represented with a depiction of Jesse, the father of King David, sleeping at the base of a tree.  The branches of the tree bear his descendants, including King David, King Solomon, and so forth.  At the top of the tree sits the Virgin Mary, and above her is the Christ Child--the final, triumphant fruit of Jesse's lineage.  I think the tall arrangement of flowers under this sculpture of Maria van  Jesse is supposed to represent that "family tree."

After walking around Delft we hopped on the train again and continued to Rotterdam, a huge city that I had only been to once before when I flew into the airport there several years ago.  It was terribly bombed during World War II, destroying the historic city center.  It has a wonderful art museum, though, and Rachel is studying a painting in its collection.  While we were there I saw a series of Dutch paintings from the Renaissance depicting the "Seven Works of Mercy."  These "Works of Mercy" come from the parable of the sheep and the goats in the gospel of Matthew--"I was hungry and ye gave me meat," "thirsty and ye gave me drink," etc.  I was really impressed that in each "Work of Mercy," the artist depicted Christ among the crowd, as one of the afflicted men and women receiving help.  You can see him here in the grayish robe with a faint halo, looking at you as he waits in line to receive bread.  He waits for us to show mercy to one the "least of these," hiding in the "distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor," as Mother Teresa used to say.

I left Rotterdam and went to class in Leiden, while Rachel went to Den Haag to visit the marvelous Mauritshuis museum, the so-called "treasure box" because of its extraordinary but fairly small collection of beautiful paintings.  Then Rachel met me in Leiden.  Here she is at a bridge that I frequently cross on my way to the train station, over the Ouderijn River.

And here by Leiden's windmill.

We ate a delicious dinner with the wonderful Dutch family I live with, complete with delicious Dutch yogurt and fruit for dessert.  And we finished up the evening in Haarlem with an organ concert at the Sint-Bavokerk.  They have a magnificent organ, and it's pretty amazing when they pull out all the stops and let it blare through the church.  The sound hovers in the air for a few seconds afterwards and then gradually evaporates away.  You can also get into the church for free when you go to an organ concert!  We walked around Haarlem and got gelato from an Italian gelateria before heading back to Amsterdam.

The Wall Houses of Amersfoort

A couple weeks ago I went to the city of Utrecht one last time so I could finish seeing the medieval collection at the Catharijneconvent museum.  I seem to always run out of time there.  It ended up taking me three separate trips to see it all! 

 This was one of the nicest objects I saw in the Catharijneconvent that day.  It is the cover for a Gospel book with ivory plaques and ancient carved gem stones.  I also got to go to the Centraalmuseum where they have paintings by the "Utrecht Caravaggisti"--Catholic seventeenth-century artists who went to Italy and brought Caravaggio's dramatic baroque style back to the Netherlands.

The white boat sailing down this canal in Utrecht is a bicycle boat!  I'd never heard of one of these before, but trust the Dutch to invent one (there are more bicycles than people in the Netherlands)!  Two people sitting in the front peddle a wheel that propels the boat through the water.  I've been told that it's very difficult to do.  I thought cycling into the heavy Dutch wind was bad, but imagine trying to peddle against water!

 

I finished up the day in Utrecht by going to another free concert at the Domkerk--the remains of the city's old cathedral.  I keep getting lucky with the music being performed when I'm there.  That Saturday it was another beautiful Renaissance choral work--a mass for the Easter season.  It had rained during the concert, and the sky was still pretty overcast when I left, but I decided that on my way home I should stop in the city of Amersfoort.  I'd never been there before, and even though everything would be closed I thought I could just walk around a little.  I'm so glad I did!  It is one of the prettiest cities I've visited in the Netherlands.  This is a view of the tower from the Church of Our Lady.  Sadly, the tower is all that remains of the church, rising above the quiet streets and canals.

Amersfoort still has a double ring of medieval walls surrounding it, and there are several gates to the city flanked by towers.

The old city walls are lined with "muurhuizen," or "wall houses."  These are fifteenth-century homes  built into the brick and stone of the city's fortifications.

And people still live in them!  I wouldn't mind having a house in a the medieval wall of Amersfoort!  I noticed that this home with the red shutters even had a religious monogram from late Middle Ages embedded in the bricks near the top window.

I walked along the perimeter of the walls, past more city gates,

beside more wall houses, some with little gardens, like this one with roses climbing over the door,

and down canals lined with trees.

I ended with this impressive gate spanning a canal into the city.  The gray sky and the light rain made the green of the grass and the trees even brighter.

Gouda Cheese

I thought I should make a pilgrimage to the city of Gouda since it is not only the home of Gouda cheese but also a famous series of sixteenth-century stained glass windows.  It is a really beautiful city.  This is a picture of the town square, taken from where I sat to eat my lunch.

And here are rounds of Gouda cheese being weighed on a large scale before going to the market.  There is a cheese museum inside this building, but I didn't have enough time to make the admission worth it.  So I ate a sample of the delicious aged Gouda cheese and left!

Gouda is also well known for its production of pipes and candles.  I saw this particularly eccentric pipe with five bowls in one of the museums.

Sint-Janskerk, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, is the largest church in the Netherlands.  Like nearly all the Dutch Gothic churches, it was converted to a Protestant sanctuary during the Reformation and much of its art destroyed.  Fortunately, the sixteenth-century stained glass windows survived.  I prefer medieval windows, but these Renaissance ones were still interesting, with scenes from the lives of Christ and St. John the Baptist against a backdrop of towering architecture rendered (a little too mathematically) in one-point perspective. 

The sign on the door to the church said "no photography," but the woman at the ticket desk said I could take one or two.  Here is number two!  It is a small window that originally came from the monastery where Erasmus of Rotterdam was ordained a priest.  Erasmus--the famous sixteenth-century humanist--lived for a while in Gouda.  He may have looked at this very window of the Lord's Betrayal in Gethsemane.

Gouda's town hall is pretty spectacular, although kind of an odd combination of a medieval castle and a Dutch canal house with red shutters!

This roaring lion bears the city's coat of arms.

And here is another view of the "Dutch Gothic" facade.

And here is a classic Dutch brick building with stepped roof and red shutters, but minus the Gothic add-ons!

This painted seventeenth-century doorway leads to the museum I visited.  It depicts the New Testament parable of Dives and Lazarus, reminding Gouda's citizens to learn from Dives' poor example and to make sure to care for the poor and hungry that may be seeking shelter in their own doorways.

A beautiful canal in Gouda.

And on an unrelated note, I also wanted to include a couple pictures from a recent visit to Amsterdam.  I went again to the Hermitage Museum--or rather the Amsterdam satellite for Russia's most famous art collection.  This is the view across the canal from the Dutch Hermitage.  Every six months a new exhibition arrives.  When I first got here the exhibition was on Alexander the Great.

Can you believe my luck?  The new exhibition was Splendor and Glory: Art of the Russian Orthodox Church.  It sounds like an exhibition designed for me!  This is a picture of the advertizement poster with an icon of the Mother of God of Kazan painted for the Russian royal family and decorated with tiny Faberge Easter eggs.  The museum had a marvelous collection of icons spanning hundreds of years, a partially constructed iconostasis ("icon screen"), altar vessels, vestments, icon battle banners, and penitential chains worn by Orthodox monks.  And they had excerpts from the Orthodox Divine Liturgy playing so that you could look at the art to the sound of church bells and the beautiful harmony of Russian choral music.