Den Haag and Scheveningen

My sense of smell returned today and I admit – shamefacedly – that my first thought was to make the most of it by having a really good meal. Dutch lunch (as opposed to dinner) menus are too often of the soup-and-sandwich variety, so I thought of heading to Scheveningen, where I could be sure of a good fish restaurant.

I returned to Den Haag (finally getting a photograph on the Van Nelle factory from the train) and caught a tram to the Gemeentemuseum. There I was stunned once again by Berlage’s design and had difficulty dragging myself away to look at the actual exhibits. I had to look at the porcelain displays and the De Stijl rooms, but I also went upstairs to look at the modern art. More Charley Toorop: I prefer her style when she paints inanimate objects. Also her father, Jan Toorop, who seems to have covered all styles. German Expressionists. A wonderful Dutch art nouveau room, which included batik wall hangings. And a couple of galleries where the idea outweighed the execution.

And then lunch! I walked back to the tram stop along the promenade in the murk.

Den Haag

I realise how I have felt dwarfed and swamped in recent days. Part of it is perhaps post-Covid tiredness – as if I don’t quite have the bandwidth to download everything at once – but I think it is also a reaction to the scale and rinsed-out diversity of what I have encountered. I think too that I am slightly disoriented by losing much of my sense of smell and taste; I drink coffee without noticing it and I passed a branch of Subway this morning without being aware of that savoury miasma that floats out of all Subway doors. Or maybe I’m just jaded and disappointed and tired of the wet weather.

Firstly: size. Rotterdam (as I know from previous visits) is a post-war city. It lost its human-size buildings in the bombardment. Pre-war architects had already moved on to size M (Sonneveld House) and L (the Van Nelle factory or Dudok’s Bijenkorf) but now it’s all XXL, symbolised perfectly in the sight of the old Holland-Amerika Lijn HQ looking insignificant in the shadow of Koolhaas and Piano. Amsterdam is more human-friendly, and old Delft is downright dinky – symbolised perfectly in Vermeer’s small painting in the Rijksmuseum of a Delft street. But Rotterdam . . . no, it’s just too much. I’ve had enough of it and I’m not in a frame of mind to admire it.

Next: the banality of variety. I haven’t recaptured that fleeting impression I had as the train passed Mechelen of being a foreign country: everything now seems crowded and homogenised. Nationalities, ages and languages vary, but everyone is dressed the same, carries the same devices and is intent on seeing the same thing. Streets and trains sound like the Home Counties or South America; I don’t know if they’re tourists like me or residents and they’re all intent on having a good time – the noisier, the better. Only the constant stream of bicycles and canals remind you that you are in the Netherlands. (Obviously I am aware of the irony of my complaining about tourism.)

Enough of the negativity. I went to Den Haag this morning to visit the Mauritshuis, which – as I’ve noted before – is just the right size for an art gallery. It was busy, of course, but everyone mills around Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring and barely looks at the View of Delft. Unlike The Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum, it was possible to get close enough to really see the little specks of paint that make the surface sparkle: hear the timbers of the boat. There was some more delicious fruit on a plinth by Adriaen Coorte: he had used the same technique for the strawberry seeds – and no mould or fly to remind the viewer (unnecessarily at my age) of the transience of ripeness.

I looked at the Holbeins again: his painting of Robert Cheeseman is so rich. I’d forgotten that the Mauritshuis has Dr Tulp in gory detail. (Nurse, where are the scrubs!) There was an interior by Pieter Saenredam of the church of St Cunera in Rhenen – which took me back to my experiences of the Netherlands on a bicycle. (Which I am slightly yearning for.)

It was raining again when I came out: time to return to Rotterdam and escape from the crowds.

Amsterdam

I didn’t want to go to Amsterdam – particularly not on such a wet day – but I did want to see The Milkmaid. So off I went.

Amsterdam was crowded, the tram was crowded, the Rijksmuseum was crowded, the lunch restaurant was crowded . . . but I may never go to Amsterdam again and I got to spend a few moments in front of some Vermeers, so it was worth it.

They are tiny! (The View of Delft in the Mauritshuis is rather bigger.) And they glow. (I guess that’s Benjamin’s “aura” theory proved then.) I enjoyed the Street in Delft as much as The Milkmaid. Beside Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch looks very ordinary: I must go to the National Gallery when I am in London and see if his Courtyard of a House in Delft looks as lovely as it used to when I had a poster of it pinned to my wall.

Other notes: the dolls’ houses were quite fun: walking up the ladder to view them more closely, seeing the smallest detail like the chamber pots beside the beds. On an early aeroplane, the polished wooden propeller that looked like a sculpture by Jean Arp. A self-portrait by Charley Toorop which I was convinced I had seen before. (But where?! This blog is supposed to remove that brain-racking, but I guess I didn’t like it enough then to note it. I still find it over-emphatic and cartoonish.) Adriaen Coorte’s delicious still lifes. The original of the Nieuwe Kerk family selfie. Delft pottery. The portraits of the Bicker père et fils which are such a contrast. The row of Rietveld chairs which look more like instruments of torture.

Delft

The morning started fine: good enough for reflections in the canal in Rotterdam and Delft of JJP Oud’s rebuilt Cafe de Unie and the Oude Kerk respectively.

It was still dry when we climbed the last of the 360+ steps to the top of the tower of the Nieuwe Church. (Not that new – 14th century.) After so many years of passing through Delft and only stopping for a coffee or second breakfast, it was enjoyable to visit the town as a tourist. The Nieuwe Church is unusual in that the chancel is taken up with a grand mausoleum to William of Orange (“the Silent” – the one who engineered resistance to Spanish rule) and the tombs of the Dutch royal family below, while the pulpit (with the abat-voix at a jaunty angle) sits in the nave amidst the congregation. The mausoleum was a big attraction: a rather smug-looking family had themselves painted in front of it (as I saw the following day in the Rijksmuseum).

Next, a visit to the Prinsenhof, a former convent where William the Silent was assassinated in 1584. I learned that “Orange” actually refers to his lands in the South of France. There was a map showing all the lands where William’s will held sway: they were scattered over north-eastern Europe as well. Goodness knows how he held them together. Little things like the very worn and pitted floor tiles caught my attention. The paintings were like poor copies of Rembrandts, Vermeers and Beuckelaers – and the gallery was small enough to make this discovery quite interesting.

And, once again, the rain started and didn’t stop.

Rotterdam day 2

We picked up our river walk where we had left it yesterday; this time we crossed back over the Willemsbrug and visited the gimmicky Cube Houses. The third time for me, and I’m not shifting from my view that they represent a poor use of space. Afterwards we went inside the Laurenskerk, which seemed strangely bare to my eyes. I’m used to either decorative Catholic churches or English CE churches which are crammed with pews, family memorials, coats of arms, hassocks, notices of Mothers’ Union meetings and updates on overseas missions.

After lunch in Dudok, we went inside the new Boijmans van Beuningen Depot and avoided the rain. It is indeed a store for hundreds of thousands of items, all collected according to what they are made of and hence their storage needs in terms of temperature, light levels and humidity. Multi-material pieces are dismantled and stored separately. There are hardly any exhibits to see – they are all packed away – but a short guided tour lets you into one storage room very briefly. The building itself is the draw, with its Piranesi-inspired staircase (which I can report is a pain) and rooftop café.

There are a couple of small exhibition spaces; one had of sketches of Rotterdam immediately after the bombardment, showing the Laurenskerk still standing, and another looking at the backs of famous paintings, showing how the canvas was kept taut and how many labels some of the well-travelled pieces had gathered.

Rotterdam

The 06.16 Eurostar to Rotterdam + dearth of photos = evidence that I am not travelling solo at present. 06.16! What was I thinking of when I said yes to that?

At Mechelen it finally hit me that I was in another country: they build things differently here. It’s slightly ironic to feel that when I’m heading to the centre of International Style: starchitects and firms known only by their initials.

This is pretty much a repeat tour from a few years ago. The differences are that today we had time to go to the very top of the Euromast (wonderful: you are shot up to the pinnacle and then corkscrew slowly down to the lower platform) and the Boijmans van Beuningen Depot is finished and looks delightfully bizarre. Over the Erasmusbrug to the old pier, and then our early-morning start caught up with us and we headed back to the hotel. We went furnished with the latest walking booklet from the tourist office, but it’s not a patch on the old one.

Maassluis to Brielle

The hotel window overlooked the little dock of Maassluis and the ocean-going tug Elbe, which was once a Greenpeace ship. Little did I realise, as I photographed Maassluis on our first day, while waiting for the ferry at Rozenburg, that we would end our holiday in the big white building opposite.

It was still windy, but not hazardously so, so we pootled along to Brielle. It’s clear from its outline on the map that it’s an old fortified town drawing up its skirts from the sea and river delta. Nowadays it’s very picturesque: even the cormorants pose like mannequins. As for the rest of the ride back to Europoort: well, full marks to Dutch civil engineers who devise cycle routes that are like silk threads through the coarse weave of the motorised petrochemical world . . . a world that I rely on as much as anyone.

Nijmegen to Maassluis

A varied journey: the stopping train to Dordrecht, then the waterbus to Rotterdam. As usual, the ferry journey was a study in greys. The ride to Maassluis though was completely unpleasant. Not so much the headwind – that just slows me down and is tiresome – but the sudden gusts of side winds when you need to turn. Everybody else just put their heads down and got on with it, but I was too unnerved by the sudden lack of control and had to get off and walk at times.

We discovered that the roadworks between Vlaardingen and Maassluis are for an enormous new tunnel under the river.

Emmerich am Rhein to Nijmegen

Last night in bed I listened to the barges floating past regularly and thought of how in my own bed I hear freight trains rattling along throughout the night.

This morning we crossed the Rhine bridge that we could see from our window and more or less followed the river to Nijmegen in a tiresome headwind. We are staying next to the railway station, so my only view of Nijmegen is from the seventh floor. It rained after we arrived, and the bicycle parking below us sparkled in the sunshine afterwards.

Maren-Kessel to Frasselt

I got out of bed this morning and looked sleepily out of the open window: it looked as if snow had fallen overnight. Nothing quite so dramatic, as my wakening brain understood, but a dense mist veiled everything. It was still hot, but setting off in the absence of scorching sunshine and a steady headwind reminded me that I can still enjoy cycling – not a feeling I’ve had over the past couple of days, I admit.

This weekend is heritage open days, so in Ravenstein there was a pop-up café next to a very old truck polished up for a guest appearance. (I wish I were in the vicinity of Radio Kootwijk, for that is a building I would love to see inside.) At Ravenstein we caught a small ferry, and at Malden (which seems to be a suburb of Nijmegen) we stopped again in an unexpectedly good patisserie while a funfair blared away outside.

It was a more varied landscape today: once we were over the Maas, there were woods and shaded paths and even something like hills as we headed to the German border, which intensified when we crossed it. Tonight we are staying in a pleasant Gasthaus next to the church (“the bells, the bells!”).