Cultural Amstedam

Description:

To view the greatest masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn, you must visit the Rijksmuseum, but in this circa-1606 house, you get a more intimate sense of Rembrandt -- it's a shrine to one of the greatest artists the world has ever known. Rembrandt bought this three-story, 10-room house in 1639 when he was Amsterdam's most fashionable portrait painter. In this house, his son Titus was born and his wife Saskia died. Due to his extravagant lifestyle, the artist was bankrupt when he left it in 1658 and moved with his son Titus and his mistress Hendrickje to a plain house (that no longer exists) on Rozengracht.

Not until 1906 was the building rescued from a succession of subsequent owners and restored as a museum. More recent restoration has returned the old house to the way it looked when Rembrandt lived and worked here, complete with a ground-floor kitchen and the maid's bedroom. Additional work in 2000 restored the artist's art-and-curiosities cabinet, his combined living room and bedroom, and the upstairs studio in which he created, among other famous works, The Night Watch.

The rooms are furnished with 17th-century objects and furniture that, as closely as possible, match the descriptions in Rembrandt's 1656 petition for bankruptcy. His printing press is back in place, and you can view 250 of his etchings and drawings on the walls, along with works by some of his contemporaries, like Jan Lievens, and his teacher, Pieter Lastman. These include self-portraits and landscapes, and several that relate to the neighborhood's traditionally Jewish character -- like the portrait of Rabbi Menassah ben Israel, who lived across the street and was an early teacher of another illustrious Amsterdammer, Baruch Spinoza. Temporary exhibits are mounted in a modern wing next door. Opposite the Rembrandthuis, appropriately, is the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Amsterdam High School for the Arts).

Description:

More than 200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), along with nearly every sketch, print, etching, and piece of correspondence the artist ever produced have been housed here since the museum opened in 1973. Van Gogh's sister-in-law and a namesake nephew presented the collection to Holland with the provision that the canvases not leave Vincent's native land. To the further consternation of van Gogh admirers and scholars elsewhere in the world, all but a few of the artist's works that aren't in this museum hang at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park near Arnhem.

You can trace this great artist's artistic and psychological development -- or decline -- by viewing the paintings displayed in chronological order according to the seven distinct periods and places of residence that defined his short career. (He painted for only 10 years and was on the threshold of success when he committed suicide at age 37). Only one of van Gogh's paintings sold during his lifetime (Theo sold it), but he did give others out to pay for food, drink, and lodgings -- some perhaps went for little more than a song.

The Potato Eaters (1885) was van Gogh's anxious and sensitive first masterpiece. Dark and crudely painted, it depicts a group of Dutch peasants gathered around the table for their evening meal after a long day of manual labor, impressing upon the viewer a sense of the hard, rough conditions of their lives. Gone are the beauty and serenity of traditional Dutch genre painting.

After his father died, van Gogh traveled first to Antwerp and then to Paris to join Theo. In Paris, he discovered and adopted the impressionists' brilliant color palette. Theo, an art dealer, introduced him to Gauguin, and the two artists often conversed about the expressive power of pure color. Van Gogh developed a thick, highly textured brushwork style to complement his intense color schemes.

In 1888, van Gogh traveled to Arles in Provence. He was dazzled by the Mediterranean sun, and his favorite color, yellow (it signified love to him), dominated such landscapes as Wheatfield with a Reaper (1889). Until his death 2 years later, van Gogh remained in the south of France painting at a frenetic pace, between bouts of madness. In The Night Café (1888), a billiard hall's red walls and green ceiling combine with a sickly yellow lamplight to charge the scene with an oppressive, almost nightmarish air. (With red and green, Vincent wrote, he tried to represent "those terrible things, men's passions.") We see the halos around the lights swirl as if we, like some of the patrons slumped over their tables, have had too much to drink.

One particularly splendid wall on the second floor has 18 paintings produced during that 2-year period in the south of France, generally considered to be his artistic high point. It's a symphony of colors and contrasts that includes Gauguin's Chair, The Yellow House, Self-Portrait with Pipe and Straw Hat, Vincent's Bedroom at Arles, Wheatfield with Reaper, Bugler of the Zouave Regiment, and the very famous Still Life Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers, best known simply as Sunflowers. By the time you reach the vaguely threatening painting of black crows rising from a waving cornfield, you can almost feel the mounting inner pain the artist was finally unable to bear.

Works by some of van Gogh's friends and contemporaries, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Monet, bolster this collection.

A new wing, elliptical and partly underground, designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, opened on Museumplein in June 1999 to temporarily house works by van Gogh and other artists.

Note: Lines at the museum can be very long, especially in summer -- try going on a weekday morning. Once inside, allow 2 to 4 hours to see everything. Audio tours with mobile-phone-type units are available.

Our Local Expert Says:

Quirkiest Church

Description:

Although the Dutch tolerance policy (gedoogbeleid) is best known today as a policy allowing licensed shops to sell cannabis as long as they don't advertise that they are doing so, this tolerance policy is actually as old as the city itself and was for 200 years the means of survival for Amsterdam's outlawed Catholic community. Between the Protestant Reformation of 1578 and the Catholic Emancipation of 1799, Catholic worship was considered illegal but was tolerated in hidden churches around this city, as long as the building was not visibly a church from the outside. This museum was once the canal house of wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman, and his former bedroom, salon, and kitchen show how he and others like him lived during the seventeenth century. But, the centerpiece of the museum, commonly called "Our Dear Lord in the Attic," is the three-story, 150-seat Catholic church in its top floors. This church was the parish church for the Catholics of the City Centre for over 200 years and, as the main Catholic church during this time, was called St. Nicholas Church after the patron saint of Amsterdam. Visiting this museum gives a glimpse not only into the lives of Golden Age canal-dwelling merchants, but also the lives of the vibrant, although oppressed, Catholic community of Amsterdam during this time. The church was reopened as a museum in 1888, one year after the new St. Nicholas Church was completed across from what is now the Centraal Station, making the Museum Amstelkring the second-oldest museum in Amsterdam after the Rijksmuseum.

Our Local Expert Says:

The most extensive collection of Dutch artists in Amsterdam.

Description:

Architect Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers (1827-1921), the grandfather of modern Dutch architecture, designed the brick museum in a monumental Dutch neo-Renaissance, gabled style. Cuypers, a Catholic, slipped in more than a dab of neo-Gothic, too, causing the country's thoroughly Protestant King William III to scorn "that cathedral." The building opened in 1885 to a less-than-enthusiastic public reception. Since then, much has been added to the building and the collection.

The Rijksmuseum contains the world's largest collection of paintings by the Dutch masters, including the most famous of all, a single work that all but defines the Golden Age. The painting is Rembrandt's The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, 1642, better known as The Night Watch. The scene it so dramatically depicts is surely alien to most of the people who flock to see it: gaily uniformed, but not exactly warrior-looking militiamen checking their weapons and accoutrements before moving out on patrol. Captain Cocq (once described as the stupidest man in the city, whose house on Singelgracht still stands), Lieutenant van Ruytenburch, the troopers, and observers (including Rembrandt himself) gaze down at us along the corridor of time, and we're left wondering what's going on underneath the paint, inside their minds. One sentiment might be irritation with this upstart artist, who painted some of their faces in profile or partly hidden, yet charged the full-face fee per man -- the militiamen hated the artistic freedom Rembrandt had exercised on their group portrait. In 1975, this masterpiece was restored after having been attacked and slashed.

Van Ruisdael, van Heemskerck, Frans Hals, Paulus Potter, Jan Steen, Vermeer, de Hooch, Terborch, and Gerard Dou are other artists represented at the Rijksmuseum. The range is impressive -- individual portraits, guild paintings, landscapes, seascapes, domestic scenes, medieval religious subjects, allegories, and the incredible (and nearly photographic) Dutch still lifes. In addition, the museum exhibits fine pieces of antique Delftware and silver.

Two rare furnished 17th-century dollhouses should be a highlight for children, by bringing the Dutch Golden Age to life for them in a way no amount of "real" stuff could. The dollhouses' former owners commissioned craftsmen to copy objects and ornaments, and the contents are exactly as they were in those days, only in miniature. Tiny seashells occupy a display cabinet. The tapestry room walls are covered with silk, the ceiling and mantelpiece are painstakingly painted, and Italian marble paves the hall floor. Silver spoons rest on the dining table and the family initials are embroidered on the napkins. Look carefully, and you'll even see pins stuck in pincushions.

In the Rijksmuseum Garden, breathe scented air and view interesting sculptural elements and other fragments from old buildings.

The Rijksmuseum also has a small gallery at Schiphol Airport.

Our Local Expert Says:

Best Cultural Performance Venue

Description:

The Concertgebouw, which literally translates to "concert building", is Amsterdam's official concert hall.  Completed in 1888, to this day it's the home of the world-famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.  Because of the buildings high quality acoustics, the Concertgebouw is considered one of the finest concert halls in the world.

Description:

The Carré family was a French/German dynasty of skilled riders and circus performers. In 1887 Oscar Carré opened the theatre in its current location as a permanent location in which to perform during the colder months. Over the years the theatre went through several renovations, changing to accommodate the current popular styles of entertainment. Now the theatre hosts everything from musicals to one-man-shows (primarily in Dutch). But, Carré has not forgotten its roots--the theatre can still be converted into a circus space. See the website for current shows.

Our Local Expert Says:

Most Spectacular Movie Theater

Description:

The Tuschinski Theatre, located just a few steps from Rembrandtplein, is the most lavish movie theater of the entire Pathe chain of cinemas. Showing a mixture of mainstream releases and more obscure art films, the theater is worth a visit solely for its design.

Built in 1921 by Abraham Tuschinski, a Polish Jew who made his way to Amsterdam with a vision to create a spectacular movie house.  The result is an Art Deco masterpiece, with decorative elements from all over the world (including an Egyptian themed main theater and Japanese themed sitting rooms).  The building is especially grand, considering it was built in a part of town that was undesirable in the 1920s.

In 2002 the Tuschinski re-opened its doors after a four year restoration project.  Today the theater extends to the surrounding buildings and contains multiple modern screening rooms.  If you want to see a movie in the original Egyptian screening room, make sure to purchase tickets for screenings in Hall 1 (Zaal 1).

Aside from the spectacular architecture, other novelties include VIP love-seats, and a bar at the concessions stand where you can buy alcoholic drinks and take them to your seat.