Sunday, July 23, 2017

RIJKS MUSEUM

We've walked the streets of the red light district with its "out there" whatever. You wanna joint, you wanna woman, oh there's another sex store.

Time to move on and discover the history and culture of Amsterdam. We paid a visit to the Resistance Museum which was confronting and definitely depressing. It left you with a feeling of why would one human do this to another. The jews of Amsterdam like France and Poland were persecuted by the Nazi and the museum depicted this with stories, film and documents. It reminded of  our visit to Oradour sur Glane in Limousine, France where on June 10, 1944 the Nazis murdered and destroyed a whole village as the war drew to a close.

On a more positive excursion, we visited the RIJKS Museum which presented the great Dutch masters through the eras. Some amazing work to be seen in ceramics and oils. The size of the paintings were amazing and the detail of the subjects enticed me to take some close ups of certain sections of the paintings.









The impressionist period has always been my favourite, from the French and also our own Australian impressionists of the Heidelberg School. Here are examples of the Dutch impressionist - no Van Gogh. He has a museum of his own that we didn't get to.








Tomorrow we hope to publish photos from the Amsterdam Museum which has a fantastic presentation called "DNA". This presentation in in the ancient building that house the Orphanage.
DNA presents the timeline of Amsterdam from its early beginnings to today.

Today we move on from Amsterdam and back to Brussels to help our son, Andrew move - that should be fun.

7 comments:

  1. Thank you.... Those guild portraits are fantastic. The merchants or tradesmen presumably wanted to show how important and civilised they were, so each member must have paid an equal amount of money to appear within the longgggg group portaits. Nowhere shows them off better than the Rijks Museum.

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    1. Is that how it works - what opportunists were the great masters!!!!
      I'm enjoying your recent pasts Hels. Where does your extraordinary historic knowledge come from?
      Mae West was great. My mother and I would enjoy her movies long ago. Very open of her to allow me to share with her.

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  2. Those portraits are so beautiful..

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    1. It was a privilege to be there to appreciate the masterpieces. I took many photos to bring home Krishna.

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  3. Leon

    I have been lecturing in history and art history since 1991 and never threw out a single page of notes. It may have taken relentless hours of work at the time of each lecture, but to modernise the notes for my blog takes next to no additional work. Thank goodness.

    Even so, I rarely write about topic that I know nothing about: eg Africa and South America; ancient Greece and Rome; modern art etc

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  4. Great blog and interesting Diane

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