Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family
Miep Gies
66,423
1,600
The winner here is not at all surprising, and in fact we’ve only had two countries where the winner had a higher ranking on both Goodreads and LibraryThing – the USA and the UK; and only another three where the winner had a higher ranking on LibraryThing but not Goodreads – Russia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. This week’s winner also won when I did this exercise in 2015.
In the improbable case that you don’t know, The Diary of a Young Girl is the journal of a Jewish teenager hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during the Second World War, with her own family, another family and a random dentist taking refuge in an hidden annex to her father’s office. The diary ends abruptly, because they were all arrested in August 1944 and deported to a series of concentration camps, where all of them except Anne Frank’s father died. I’m personally fascinated by the story, and have written about the translation and about Anne’s writing here and here, and also about the dentist who she shared her room with.
Goodreads combines the numbers for all three editions of The Diary of a Young Girl currently on the market, while LibraryThing separates them out (and I have combined them above), but it would have been the winner anyway. Also worth noting perhaps that the eighth book is also about Anne Frank.
I disqualified six books this time. Less than half of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is set in the Netherlands (though I believe that it too has a lot of Anne Frank in it). The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is set in New York. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, despite the title, is mainly set in London. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is set in many countries, though she does end up in the Netherlands. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is actually set in Japan. And Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is global in scope.
That’s it from Europe for a while; next are Ecuador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Conakry.
On the way home from the Netherlands on Monday (closing out the longweekend), we stopped in Venray, where my second cousin once removed Gerard Valentine Ryan is buried, a few hundred metres from where he died on 17 October 1944, at the age of 21. It was literally his first hour in battle. He was leading a platoon of riflemen towards the occupied town when a machine-gun hidden in the trees opened up, killing him and another solder immediately. A third soldier was killed shortly afterwards, while checking on the dead and wounded.
This was at the tail end of the Battle of Overloon, a mopping up of the German presence remaining on the western side of the Maas / Meuse after the much more famous Operation Market Garden.TheAllies captured the towns of Overloon and Venray, but it was a costly victory and the Germans retained their positions on the western bank of the Maas until the war was almost over.
Gerard and his two fellow riflemen were initially buried where they fell, and later transferred to the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery just along the road, along with 690 others. Gerard’s ID tags had been lost, but he was identified by a cross and chain that he had been wearing. Now he rests beside his comrades.
The people of Venray have set up a lovely project where local people and families adopt graves of particular soldiers to look after them and commemorate them. We were privileged to meet Mr and Mrs Jansen, who have adopted Gerard’s grave, and had gathered the details of his death and reburial. I found it tremendously moving that this whole community is still honouring and respecting those who died liberating their town from the Nazis, eighty years ago.
I must thank Mr Hoebers and Mr Vervoort from the Committee, who had organised for us all to meet at the cemetery (the photos were taken by Mr Vervoort); and my third cousin Desmond Ryan, Gerard’s first cousin once removed, who had blazed a trail by visiting a couple of years ago and also put me in touch with the relevant local folks.
Last weekend’s trip to see the hunebedden of Drenthe had a couple more stops which are worthy of note, though the Saturday and Sunday were both very wet.
Logistical details: We stayed at an AirBnB in Steendam, half an hour east of Groningen. This was not geographically very close to where we wanted to be, but the place looked charming and the price was good.
In fact, I can honestly say that in nine years of using AirBnB, this was the best experience I have had. The apartment was just as charming as it looked in the photos and very comfortable. For a modest extra charge the hosts provided a lavish breakfast, with enough leftovers to keep us going for the rest of the day. Recommended.
I am up North this weekend, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, feeding my interest in matters megalithic by inspecting the hunebedden, the huge 5000-year-old stone structures which are dotted around the province. In fact, Drenthe has no less than 52 of them, and there are another two in Groningen; in the whole of the rest of the Netherlands there is one (1) surviving megalithic structure, a tomb near Maastricht.
Herman Clerinx, in his book Een Palais voor de Doden, tallies twelve dolmens and menhirs in Belgium, and one in Luxembourg. (I have been to all of them.) This means that 76% of all the surviving megalithic monuments in the three Benelux countries are in Drenthe, otherwise one of the least remarkable Dutch provinces.
Even though the hunebedden are not that different from each other (which itself is interesting; compare the variations among the Belgian monoliths, and their contrast with Wéris), they are still pretty spectacular. We looked at six of them today, which is more than 10% of the total number, and unusually for this blog, I’m going to lead with my video reaction to each one, since photographs just don’t capture the majestic structure.
Second paragraph of third chapter (which is presented bilingually in the original text):
Hoe bijzonder het precies is dat Jardin d’émail als monumentale tuin gerealiseerd is, is moeilijk te bevatten. Natuurlijk, het was Dubuffet die het kunstwerk schiep, eerst als een Édifice van twee bij drie meter met de titel Jardin d’émail. Maar het is museumdirecteur Oxenaar die zorgt voor de ‘vergroting’ van het idee, zoals Dubuffet dat in een brief verwoordt. Binnen het oeuvre van Dubuffet wordt Jardin d’émail gerekend tot de belangrijkste voorbeelden van zijn L’Hourloupe-architectuur samen met Closerie Falbala en de Groupe de quatres arbres, een groep van vier bomen voor een bankgebouw in New York en gemaakt in opdracht van de Amerikaanse bankier Rockefeller. (afb. pp. 38-39)
It is difficult to comprehend how amazing it is that Jardin d’émail has been realized as a monumental garden. Of course, it was Dubuffet who created the artwork, initially as an Édifice measuring two by three metres and with the title Jardin d’émail. But it is the museum director Oxenaar who enables the ‘enlargement’ of the idea, as Dubuffet puts it in a letter. Within Dubuffet’s oeuvre, Jardin d’émail is considered one of the most important examples of his L’Hourloupe architecture, together with Closerie Falbala and the Groupe de quatres arbres, a group of four trees for a bank building in New York, commissioned by the American banker Rockefeller. (image pp. 38-39)
The Jardin d’émail (Enamel Garden) is one of the most striking sculptures in the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo, in the Netherlands. It’s twenty metres by thirty, a stylised garden made not of enamel but of concrete, epoxy resin, polyurethane and paint. It’s probably the biggest single artwork in the whole museum.
We went to see it in 2005 and again in 2022. Here’s my attempt to recreate the same scene twice.
And here’s me beside the central butterfly:
This short book about it by art historian Roos van der Lint describes it as “deeply embedded” in the Dutch national consciousness, and goes into the story of Jean Dubuffet’s career (originally in the family wine shipping trade, but became an artist during the second world war) and how museum director Rudi Oxenaar was impressed by a smaller version, two metres by three, and commissioned the larger one for the Kröller-Müller Museum, built between 1968 and 1973. It also explains the extensive process of restoration in 2020 – it certainly seemed in much better shape the second time we went.
It’s possibly the single most interesting object in the entire Dutch province of Gelderland, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you should take it. Otherwise you can get this little book here, for only €12,50 plus postage, which I think is a real snip.
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!
As previously noted, we took the Whitsun / Pentecost / Pinksteren weekend in the Netherlands for some low-key tourism, the most high-energy part of which was the Amsterdam church tour recommended by Cate Desjardins. To get the basics oout of the way:
We stayed in the Schiphol Airport Hampton by Hilton, in the outskirts of the town of Hoofddorp, across the road from the railway station and just off the motorway. Very comfortable room and decent breakfast. Half the price of similar hotels in the city.
Friday dinner: nipped across the road to the Novotel for the Gourmet Bar, very acceptable. Saturday coffee:Aran’s Irish Pub, between Max Euwe Plein and Singelgracht. Saturday lunch: McDonald’s, I’m afraid. (Damrak 8, near the Nieuwe Kerk) Saturday snack:De Koffieschenkerij, beside the Oude Kerk. Saturday dinner: we ventured into Hoofddorp which turns out to be an atrtactive enough dormitory town, and ended up at the Tandoori Lounge which was absolutely fine. Sunday coffee: at the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam Sunday lunch:De Wachtlokaal, a cheerful cafe near the station in Haarlem; my salad was huge. Sunday snack:Cleef Frans Hals, the museum cafe in Haarlem. Sunday dinner: I was determined not to leave the Netherlands without a rijsttafel, and found one at Sari in Heemstede, 10 km from our hotel. Monday lunch: Fantastic pancakes at ‘t Hoogstraatje on a square in Nijmegen. Monday snack:Eis Cafe Riva in Kleve.
On Saturday and Sunday we travelled to Amsterdam and Haarlem by train, and then drove to Heemstede that evening, and Nijmegen and Kleve on Monday.
So, what did we do? One thing that didn’t work out was my original plan to visit the Rijksmuseum. We had already completely missed the Vermeer exhibition, which apparently sold out in a couple of hours after the tickets became available. And it turns out that the rest of the Rijksmuseum is so popular that you need to book several days in advance just to get to the permanent exhibition. So we struck out on both Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday, as mentioned, we did the church tour and on Sunday we went back to the English Reformed Church (which is in fact run by the Church of Scotland) as it had been closed the previous day, and mingled with the congregation drinking coffee.
We then took the train to Haarlem, to visit the Frans Hals Museum. Misleadingly, it doesn’t have all that much art by Frans Hals, though it does have some, including all of his surviving group portraits (one currently on loan from the Riksmuseum). It does have a very rich store of European art from his day onwards, including this Bosch-like Temptation of St Anthony by Jan Mandijn:
From more modern times, I very much liked this Standing Nude by Theo van Rysselberghe, a Belgian painter who tried pointillism and then tried nudes, this one dating from the crossover point. (I have not found another image of this particular painting online, though there are plenty of the same model painted nude by van Rysselnerghe in different poses.)
We spent most of the afternoon atthe museum and could easily have spent longer. The cafe was good too.
The next day was Open Church Day in the Netherlands, and we discovered that another church with decorations by Jan Dunselman was open for visitors in Nijmegen. This is the furthest from Amsterdam of any of his churches, the only other outlier being his home town of Den Helder.
In the Church of the Nativity of Mary in Nijmegen, Dunselman again did the Stations of the Cross, similar and also different to the ones in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Amsterdam. Compare the two takes on “Jesus Falls the Third Time”, Nijmegen above, Amsterdam below.
The walls are also decorated with various saints offering their approval. My eye was caught by the two St Catherines. Are you Team Alexandria, or Team Siena?
We walked to the centre of Nijmegen, past a lovely ruined chapel, and had lunch outside at a pancake restaurant on the square.
Our final stop was across the German border, at the Church of the Assumption by the Kleiner Markt in Kleve. This interests me not so much for what is there but for what is no longer there. The white building on the right is on the site of the inn “Zum Grossen Kurfürst” which featured several stucco ceiling by my favourite seventeenth-century stuccador, Jan Christian Hansche. It was destroyed during the second world war.
Anne *in* Cleves, not Anne *of* Cleves
There is some striking sculpture in the square, the “Fountain of Fools” in the middle:
And by the church, the Fallen Warrior by Ewald Matare, erected in 1934, removed and broken up by the Nazis in 1938, and restored in 1981.
The church itself is rather pretty inside, with some medieval artwork that must have survived elsewhere, but I don’t seem to have taken any photos. We had a little look around Kleve and had a final snack in a square whose fountain boasts another remarkable sculpture by Karl-Hennig Seemann, commemorating local legendary boy Lohengrin:
We’re taking the long weekend in the metropolis to the north, and yesterday we did a walkling tour of six Amsterdam churches, following a trail laid out by Cate Desjardins in a 2019 blog post. This nicely took up an extended afternoon, from about 12 to about 5. The map on Cate’s blog post no longer works, so here’s mine (you go from south to north):
The first church on the list is De Krijtberg, a Jesuit church dedicated to St Francis Xavier, built in the 1880s to replace one of the many “hidden churches” in the city built when Catholics could not worship openly. Like a lot of buildings in Amsterdam, it is tall and narrow, and has adapted the nineteenth-century Catholic aesthetic accordingly. Its own website said it did not open until after lunch, but Cate’s blog said it opened at 12 and Cate was right.
Not for the first time, I was struck by one of the stained glass windows (probably by the studio of F. Nicolas in the early 20th century), in this case the Jesuits Doing Good in Africa, whether the Africans wanted them to or not.
Our second stop was at the Begijnhof, the former enclosed community for single women (usually Catholics, not usually nuns), which remains a residential space under the protection of St Ursula (who we would see again):
Unfortunately the ancient Begijnhof chapel itself was closed for renovations.
We went back this morning and sneaked into a service at the English Reformed Church. It has a lovely stained glass window commemorating the Pilgrim Fathers.
And the organist played “Simply the Best” at the end, as a tribute to Tina Turner, after the scheduled Buxtehude, which was a lovely touch.
But yesterday we were able to appreciate the serenity away from the bustle outside.
And there is Art.
Third up is the Nieuwe Kerk, one of the big Protestant churches of Amsterdam which is now an art gallery. Cate in her blog post feels this is somewhat skippable; we were fortunate because there is an impressive exhibition there at the moment, and that was well worth the admission price. The original fabric is also visible here and there, including the tomb of Admiral de Ruyter.
The current exhibition, World Press Photo 2023, is stunning and gut-wrenching. It starts with previous famous photos, such as fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts trying to go to school in North Carolina, and Tank Man from Tian-an-Men Square.
Of this year’s photos, I was particularly moved by this fifteen-year-old mother, her baby’s sixteen-year-old father having been killed in the Philippines’ war on drugs.
And the picture of the year is a woman being evacuated from Mariupol hospital in Ukraine, having been wounded while in labour by a deliberate Russian attack on the building. She and the baby both died.
Thoughtfully we wandered up to the red light district and the Oude Kerk, which had the highest admission price of any of the churches and frankly the least to see. It too is an exhibition space but there was nothing much on. A detailed audio guide takes you through the church fabric, including St Ursula again, partially preserved from iconoclasm, in the ceiling.
I think with both the Oude and the Nieuwe Kerk, it pays to check out the exhibitions in advance.
We skipped ahead on Cate’s list to go to the Basilica of St Nicholas next, because both she and the website said that it closed relatively early – in fact it stayed open later than we had been told. Like De Krijtberg, this is a working Catholic church built in the 1880s, but with a bit more space. An American choir was getting ready to perform Evensong.
Here we were both really grabbed by the Stations of the Cross by Jan Dunselman, which combine a realist sensitivity with an almost pre-Raphaelite balance of lighting.
Dunselman specialised in Stations of the Cross, and Dutch Wikipedia lists nine other churches where he tackled them. If we lived closer to this part of the world, I would try and check them all out.
Last but not least, we doubled back to Our Lord in the Attic, a hidden church from the time when Catholics could not worship openly, which has been preserved and restored. It is not very accessible for visitors with mobility issues.
This has very good displays explaining how and why the church was built in this way. I could not help but think of Anne Frank and her family, continuing the Amsterdam tradition of hiding up the staircase, centuries later and a little farther west. At the end we see St Nicholas again, patron saint of the city and of pawnbrokers and much else, holding onto his balls.
Anyway, this was a great way to explore a part of Amsterdam’s history. A couple more details: we paid for the three museums, but not the Begijnhof or the two active churches. Also, Amsterdam is full of places to snack or eat.
Anne and I took the opportunity of Belgium’s National Day last week to, er, get out of Belgium, and return to the Hoge Veluwe and the Kröller-Müller Museum, which we had previously visited 17 years ago in 2005. Again we stayed in the luxurious Hotel Sterrenberg; again, we spent most of Friday wandering around the museum, which boasts a fantastic sculpture park and an impressive indoor art collection.
Lots of pics of Art here. It was particularly amusing to return to Jean Dubuffet’s “Jardin d’émail” and try to reproduce the photos we had taken on a less crowded day on our previous visit.
Finally, there was an exhibition of photographs under the title of “Mother, Wonder” by Roni Horn, all of landmarks (Icelandic hills, I think) that look vaguely like breasts.
Oh, also finally, here is Lois Weinberger‘s 2010 “Green Man”. Made of cactus. You can fill in the obvious joke for yourself.
On the way up the previous day, we stopped in ’s Hertogenbosch, home town of the great medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch, and visited the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center. This is a former church with no original art by Bosch, but with accurate reproductions of pretty much all of his surviving work, arranged in chronological order. I found this a fascinating way of presenting the artist’s work, and really got a lot more out of it than from the usual one or two works by him in a larger gallery.
There’s a glorious reconstructed astronomical clock with the souls of the Saved ascending to heaven at the end of time:
And finally (really finally this time), after we’d finished up at the Kröller-Müller Museum, we went just a little further to Apeldoorn and met up with A, our former au pair in 2003, who we had not seen since she was expelled from Belgium in 2004. She hadn’t changed a bit, and we had a lovely dinner with her and her partner M, before going home on the Friday night.
The goddess Nehalennia was worshipped in ancient Roman times by the people of the Schelde delta; what is now Zeeland in the Netherlands. She is always depicted with a basket of fruit and/or loaves, and a dog. Nobody knows why.
She had been largely forgotten by history until 1645, when a massive storm shifted the coastal dunes revealing a lost temple near the town of Domburg. Dozens of votive plaques to Nehalennia were found, all showing her with her dog and her basket of apples. It is thought that sailors threw them overboard, or otherwise dedicated them, at the start of a voyage to pray for safety.
The many votive plaques were stored in the church in Domburg. One night in 1848 the church was struck by lightning, caught fire and collapsed, destroying the ancient limestone within. (I am not making this up.) Only one of the ancient tablets to Nehalennia survived, because it had been lent to scholars in Brussels and had not been returned following Belgian independence. The sole surviving tablet is now in the Cinquantenaire Museum, and I went to see it with little U at Christmas time.
Since 1970, more tablets to Nehalennia have been coming to light a bit further along the coast at Colijnsplaat, where local pagan enthusiasts have now built a small Roman-era-style temple to the goddess, which I visited last September.
It includes both a genuine Roman Nehalennia tablet and a more modern vision of the divinity.
Local pagans use the building for weddings and other celebrations. It is good to see the memory of a powerful woman being revived and venerated, even if she probably never existed.
Toch zijn er in het 18e eeuwse deel van na de verbouwing van 1782-1784 nog sporen van een eerdere verschijningsvorm te vinden. De vleugel waar de ridderzaal nog aanwezig is, stamt uit het begin van de 17c eeuw. Aan de hand van oude tekeningen is er een reconstructie van het oude kasteel en van de laat 18e eeuwse vorm gemaakt. Van beide verschijningsvormen zijn maquettes gemaakt die op het kasteel aanwezig zijn.
Nevertheless, in the 18th century part of [the building], after the 1782-1784 renovation, traces of an earlier appearance can still be found. The wing where the knights’ hall survives, dates from the early 17th century. A reconstruction of the old castle and its late 18th century form has been made on the basis of old drawings. Models of both versions can be seen at the castle.
This is a really short book about the stucco ceilings at the Castle of Boxmeer in the Netherlands, which the custodians kindly sent me after a phone query. I had hoped that it might be yet more work of the great Jan Christian Hansche, based on a reference in a Dutch source. However, most of the stucco in Boxmeer seems to date from after his time. There is a cryptic signature in one of the ceilings which looks like “Hen. Hansche” or “Ger. Hansche”; but my Hansche had two daughters and a son who like him was named Jan, so it doesn’t even seem to be the same family. I’ll hope to get up there and make my own assessment, but it’s not a priority.
Chris: “It’s about time you had a wee chat with her.”
I picked this up on spec last year from one of the local comics shops. It’s a story of young Dutch people in the occupied Netherlands during the second world war; after it’s all over, the protagonist, Victor, meets up with his ex-girlfriend, Esther, and reminisces in a series of nested flashbacks about the good times, the bad times and the terrifying times with their friend Chris, who got killed by the Germans (this is not a spoiler, the first page shows his gravestone in detail). The plot is yer typical young-folk-under-occupation tale; the art consciously refers to Dutch propaganda posters of the period, and as is often the case with graphic stories sometimes catches feelings and events that mere prose cannot. It’s backed up by photographic and documentary evidence about what happened to the real people on whom the story is based, which I guess makes it more immediate, though personally I’m generally happy to accept that fiction can have truth without being tightly linked to actual historical events.
The title translates as “Splinters”, and a second and final part of the series has now been published with the title “Littekens” / “Scars”. To be honest I made yet another of my mistakes in buying it – I thought it was by a Flemish writer, and it wasn’t until I got to the bits about Queen Wilhelmina that I made sense of the various hints that it was not set in Belgium after all. Still, it was engaging enough that I will probably get the second half.
