An early Valentine’s weekend up north (sorry, Dutch-based chums, this was a just-us romantic weekend and we didn’t see anyone else) to visit a few museums.
Accommodation: IBIS Leiden Centre, cheap and cheerful.
Friday lunch: Tapa Thai, Stationsweg 3, Leiden; decent value, rice a bit dry.
Friday dinner: Surakarta, Noordeinde 51-53, Leiden; very satisfactory Indonesian, helpful explanations of unfamiliar food.
Saturday lunch: The Rijksmuseum Cafe; friendly service and filling victuals
Saturday dinner: Verboden Toegang, Kaiserstraat 7, Leiden; hearty stuff, good service, better value than I would get in PLux.
Sunday lunch: Pieterskerk Cafe, quiet and healthy.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the Bronze Age
This was what sparked the idea for our trip, a big exhibition about the Bronze Age in Europe, bringing together some prize exhibits from other museums, and basically selling the message that the Europe of 3000 years ago had intense internal cultural links and also communications deep into Asia.
The hit of the exhibition is is the Nebra Sky Disc, from 1600-1800 BC, the oldest known visual representation of the universe from anywhere in the world. Found by illegal treasure hunters in East Germany in 1999, sold by them as soon as they dug it up, recovered by Swiss police in a raid in Basel in 2002, now permanently on display in Halle (but on loan to Leiden). Some of you may have seen it in the British Museum last year.
It’s a truly striking artefact. You know exactly what it is meant to be. The makers have communicated their interest in the night sky to you directly, 3,600 years on.
There are a couple of other personal artefacts that spoke to me. The Mold gold cape, for instance, from about the same time as the Sky Disc but found at the far end of the trade routes, in Wales, on loan from the British Museum:
Or the Schifferstadt Sun hat, one of four such hats found in France and Germany, perhaps for celebrants to wear at ceremonies welcoming / summoning the return of the Sun?
Just a week ago, on 2 February, worshippers paraded around our local chapel bearing candles to celebrate the arrival of spring. I bet that ceremony has been going on longer than Christianity in our part of the world.
Another stunning display has six ceremonial (magic?) swords, made in the same East Anglia workshop, found separately in England, France and the Netherlands, brought together here for the first time.
They are not practical for combat, but instead were all found ritually placed into damp ground and abandoned; one of them (the second from the right) was carefully and perhaps ritually warped before the deposition. A sacrifice of weapons, specially commissioned from Norfolk, to show unity with the land? Though I cannot be the only visitor who thought of Monty Python:
We tend to think of Bronze Age archaeology as concerned with beautiful material artfacts, like the gold and weapons above and the torcs and bracelets below. And they are lovely.
But a couple of other exhibits really got me.
It’s a stone from a grave in Anderlingen, Germany, with three figures on it. One has outstretched hands, one has an axe, one has a robe. Are they fighting? Dancing? Worshipping? All three? Something else?
But what got to me most was the reconstruction of women’s clothing from grave goods.
On the right, we are told, is the oldest dress in the Netherlands, from 800 BC near Eindhoven. Enough survives to be sure that there was a check pattern coloured by cochineal and wode; this high status woman was buried in her favourite clothes..
But on the left we have the Egtveld Girl, found in Denmark with her clothes in good preservation. She wore a belt with a big gold disc, and a short corded skirt. She was only a teenager, but had moved around a lot in her short life. Her skirt is surely made for dancing; to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are my own colleagues performing “Hips don’t lie” by Shakira:
Anyway, it’s a tremendous exhibition, and you have five more weeks to go to it.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the rest
To be honest, we didn’t see a lot of the permanent collection, but this piece really jumped out at me, at the end of a small gallery of cameos:
It is the Gemma Constantiniana, created by the Senate of Rome as a trophy for the Emperor Constantine in 315 after he vanquished his rival emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Drawn by (male) centaurs, trampling Maxentius, Constantine and his fmily ride to glory and accept a triumphal wreath from an angelic figure.
What happened to it in the next 1,300 years is obscure, but it came into the hands of the Dutch East India Company in 1628, possibly via the collection of Pieter Paul Rubens. They decided to sell it to the Mongol Emperor Jahangir, who was a big collector, and packed into the cargo of the East India Company’s biggest ship, the Batavia. However, the Batavia was wrecked off the coast of Australia, and the surviving passengers held hostage by mutineers until reinforcements arrived a year later.
The Gemma Constantiniana was successfully salvaged, but Jahangir had died (he had actually died before the Batavia left) and his heir Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) was less interested in that kind of thing, so it returned to the Netherlands and is now on permanent display in Leiden.
Two other great cameos survive, one of Augustus in Vienna and one of Tiberius in Paris. They have less exciting histories.
The Rijksmuseum
We had missed out on the Rijksmuseum on our 2023 trip to Amsterdam due to poor planning on my part. But it’s less than an hour by train and we grabbed the opportunity yesterday.
Wow. The Rijksmuseum is very big. We stayed in it for almost five hours (including a lunch break) but it still wasn’t enough. Despite knowing the Netherlands well, I think it may have been my first visit. I hope it will not be my last.
Starting with the Night Watch – carefully protected from the public, which is probably just as well as it allows you to take it all in. But I guess I hadn’t realised that it is in a genre of squad portraits. Here is another by Bartholomeus van der Helst, the Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster, from 1648:
On the cuirasse of the large chap on the right, you can see the reflections of three of his neighbours.
Also up in that gallery there is a little Vermeer alcove with seven of his household scenes. There’s something very attractive and eye-catching about his use of light. The Milkmaid is (by a small margin) my favourite.
Much much food for future #ThursdayArt posts here (I do this occasionally on most of my social media channels). Three other things at the Rijksmuseum that made me stop in my tracks:
This isn’t Great Art, but it’s the transom of the English navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch in 1667, in full sight of the impotent English leadership. When he heard the news, Samuel Pepys lamented, “I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone…” and warned his family that he himself, as a senior naval administrator, might be the target of political violence. It was the worst ever defeat for the English navy in home waters. The Dutch used the captured flagship as a party boat for a while, but scrapped it a few years later, saving the stern for public display.
Both Anne and I stopped and went ‘gosh’ when we saw this 1815 portrait of Emma Jane Hodges, daughter of the Anglo-Dutch painter Charles Howard Hodges. She was born in 1791 (so is 24 here) and lived to 1868; she did not marry, and left her collection of her father’s paintings to the Rijksmseum. Something about the use of light and the expression on her face really grabbed us.
And the third thing that grabbed me goes without saying. Most of the Van Goghs in Amsterdam are (unsurprisingly) in the Van Gogh Museum, but the 1888 Wheatfield really calls out to you across a crowded room.
Other things that caught our eye in the Rijksmuseum:
Lots of model ships!
In the navy – Yes, you can sail the seven seas
In the navy – Yes, you can put your mind at ease
In the navy – Come on now, people, make a stand
In the navy, in the navy
Two different but similar treatments of St Ursula with her virgins.
One of several magnificent doll’s houses (the Dutch royals are really into them).
Also a brilliant exhibition of American photography, and much else that I ran out of energy before recording.
I should say two more things. First, the 18th-century art is really not a patch on the 17th-century Golden Age stuff. It picks up again during and after the Napoleonic wars, but it’s as if the artistic impulses were exhausted after Remrandt, Vermeer and all those folks.
Second, there was a very interesting section about art and Dutch colonialism in Asia and the Americas (apart from the Caribbean and Suriname, I had forgotten that they occupied a large chunk of Brazil for 24 years). The commentary is frank about the nature of colonial exploitation and the human damage done by the enterprise.
Wereldmuseum Leiden
We had been to what used to be the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden back in 2021, but returned to it for a temporary exhibition on gold. Lots of gold to see here, including these reliquaries:
And Thom Puckey’s sculpture, The Wife of the Alchemist, dedicated to the legend of Perenelle Flamel.
Also one can never get enough of the Buddha Room.
The Observatory and Hortus Botanicus
Not the best of weather for the Leiden botanical gardens, but the observatory had a nice little art exhibition about time and science and plants.
Here at the entrance is a fantastic rotating assembly of lenses with spotlights shining through them, by Jos Agasi.
And this is very simply the decay of a shoe over the ages, by Oscar Santillán.
The Pieterskerk
The deconsecrated Pieterskerk was the last of our tourism stops; it has a nice corner dedicated to the Pilgrim Fathers who worshipped there.
And then home. It’s a bit more than two hours to drive for us; for those of you coming from further away, there’s a direct train connection to Schiphol airport, and plenty to see (and eat and drink). Recommended!