Monday, April 24, 2023 – AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – We arrived in Amsterdam early this morning after our overnight flight, but only one of us managed to get any sleep. So we faced a looooong day of staying awake until we could check in to our hotel this afternoon. It wasn’t a problem for me, since I was the one who catnapped across Greenland and Iceland, but poor Rick was dragging, though rather cheerfully, I must admit. We dropped our bags at our hotel and set out for Rembrandt’s house, a grand house in his day, the place where he lived and painted for nearly two decades before debts and overspending drove him to much humbler quarters and a pauper’s grave somewhere in the floor of the Westerkerk. So we devoted our day, this first day of our art tour of Netherlandish and Flemish art, to Rembrandt.

Rembrandt was just 33 and a successful painter when he moved into the house in 1639. The red-shuttered building has been restored and furnished using a list of his personal property sold when he was forced out at the age of 52. It was very crowded when we arrived, so we didn’t linger in the small, crowded rooms and tight spiral staircases. For me, the two highlights were a small drawing of a canal and boats he had made as he himself wandered the streets of Amsterdam, and a gorgeous, pensive portrait of his son, Titus van Rijn, at a desk with writing paper and implements. The dark background, and the lovely touches of an earthy red (the color, it turns out of the ceiling of the Oude Kerk, the oldest church in the city dating back to the 12th century), brought life and poignancy to the portrait of his young son, who was to die before Rembrandt. His drawing of the boat, set alongside drawings made by Rembrandt’s contemporaries, was by far the most beautiful, a calmness expressed in a few swirls of ink in the sky.

We escaped the crowds at the Rembrandthuis only to find that the only place you could escape the crowds in Amsterdam is to actually go into a church. Both the 13th-century Oude Kerk, “old church,” in the red light district, and the Nieuwe Kerk, in the Dam, or central square of the city, charge admission – so many tourists take a pass! The “new church” dates from 1409, when it was, in fact, new, and it is beautiful inside. It no longer serves as a church, but as an art exhibition space, as well as serving royal functions such as the inauguration site for the king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, back in 2013. Right now, the building is hosting the World Press Photo Exhibition 2023, honoring the best news photography in the world last year. We thought of our friend Elizabeth Dalziel, a photographer who has spent a lot of time in war zones. Much of the photography was painful – haunting images of the war in Ukraine, suffering in Myanmar, a 15-year-old from Afghanistan who had sold his kidney for $3,500 to the U.S. to help his family survive. But there were also photos of great hope, including of a young woman in Tehran, head uncovered, ankles peeking out between her jeans and her shoes, in a courageous act of defiance against the laws forcing women to cover themselves completely. There was also a wall remembering all the journalists killed since 1992 – a staggering number of names on a stark black slate rising high up against the gothic windows of the church. You can explore the winners at their website: https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo-contest/2023/Ahmad-Halabisaz/1

After that, we needed some air. We wandered in the footsteps of Rembrandt, past the house in the canal district where he bought his paints, past the entrance to the painter’s guild where he belonged – the guild of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, in the old gate house where Rembrandt painted his famous portrait of a doctor doing an autopsy on a criminal’s cadaver. Though it was a showery, cold day with a blustery wind, we managed to stay dry. The streets were crowded with tourists, speaking so many languages, and it was difficult to walk – you had to be on guard for the trucks, and the cars, and the bikes, and the garbage that seemed to be everywhere.

We finished our walk at Anne Frank’s house. We didn’t go in – tickets are sold out for days. I had gone years ago, and Rick decided he would honor her by reading her diary before our trip, rather than trying to see her last home and hiding place, which attracts thousands of visitors a year. He was moved, and depressed, by her diary – the senselessness of her murder, and that of millions of others in the Holocaust. The evil. The capacity of humans to harm one another, and the innocent. Like the photographs we saw earlier in the day. The only possible redemption was the power of this young woman’s words, like that of the power of the young Iranian woman’s courage, to stand as witness that the human spirit is strong, and very very beautiful.

We finally were able to check in, and Rick took a nap before dinner. We need to gather our strength for Vincent Van Gogh tomorrow – we have tickets for a 9 a.m. entry and then will (hopefully) spend the afternoon biking through the tulip fields outside the city!

Postscript: We had an absolutely lovely dinner at our hotel, in a window seat overlooking a canal. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and the wind turned the terrace outside into a pink snowstorm of blossoms. We are staying in a hotel out from the center, and we are glad to be away from the craziness of central Amsterdam. We loved being in an actual neighborhood, and we spent dinner watching the people walking their dogs along the canal, groups of women sculling on the canal, an occasional runner. We watched two men work for nearly two hours trying to get an old beat-up boat to start. They were still working when we finished dinner and went out to join the others walking the canal.

One other postscript: Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncy Billups was on our flight this morning. I speculated maybe he wanted to catch the Vermeer show too, but Rick said their general manager was at the Amsterdam airport when we arrived. Rick and Mitchell were abuzz with excitement that he might be trying to recruit some French superstar, or someone else unknown. Perhaps Coach Billups will also make time for Vermeer on his way home. I hope so.