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.

This is the whole “Jardin d’émail” from outside.

There is a lot more. The odd Hepworth:

A very sensual “Love” by Joseph Mendes da Costa:

These are the Rocky Lumps II by Tom Claasen, made after the first Rocky Lumps succumbed to too many children climbing on it.

Indoors they have the world’s second largest Van Gogh collection.

But also other artists who I am less familiar with, like Fernand Leger and his “Soldiers Playing Cards” (1917):

And Charley Toorop and her fascinating self-portraits.

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.