The Ham Nomads

27 Sep 2015. <NL> Amsterdam —

Today, the Van Gogh Museum. Back into Amsterdam and down to Museumplein, today the venue of a craft market!

The museum is incredibly popular. Even though we had the I amsterdam card, we still had to queue for about 30 minutes just to get the tickets. (Without the card, it would have been at least twice as long!).

We've been here before, and so when we went in we expected it all to be familiar territory. Well, it was in a way, but some of the best paintings just weren't there in the main collection. This is because of a special exhibition going on here, of Van Gogh and Edvard Munch ('Munch : Van Gogh') being mounted by the Van Gogh Museum and by the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo.

A 'prank' painting while Vincent was at art school!

Probably one of Vincent's earliest major works,
The Potato Eaters (Note his early dark, brown palette.)

The thing about Van Gogh and Munch was that they were both born around the same time (although Munch outlived Van Gogh by quite a time, they were both innovators in their art, and both were subject to mental illness. The paintings (and, in the case of Munch, prints) are very different, but there are similar themes running through them. Apparently, the Van Gogh Museum is constantly fielding queries, "Where is The Scream" — a lot of people have conflated the two artists in their minds!

While he was committed in the asylum at Arles, Vincent reinterpreted a number of paintings and prints in his possession — works by Millet (whom he revered as a master of painting the peasantry) and the Japanese woodcut master Hiroshige. And, even though it is not a copy, when we saw Vincent's Two Peasant Women in the Peat Fields we couldn't help but be reminded of Millet's The Gleaners.

Munch's most famous painting, The Scream was painted a while after he had what must have been a psychotic episode, in which the whole landscape appeared to turn red and to scream at him. Other works on display included his Madonna, both as a painting and as a print, and one of his famous Vampire series of prints.

We were particularly taken by his various wheatfields paintings, and of course the sunflowers — we've had a whole trip characterised by sunflowers all along the way!

Wheatfield under thunderclouds

Wheatfield with reaper

Wheatfield with crows
(once thought to be his last painting)

Tree roots and trunks
(unfinished, found on his easel after his death)

One of his most delightful paintings is his Almond Blossoms, painted on the birth his nephew, named Vincent after his uncle.

One of his most famous paintings is Starry Night, but that's over in New York. But here there was his Starry night over the Rhône — not the wild swirls of the other, but still impressive — and, for the astronomer, the tail of Ursa Major, aka 'The Plough', or 'The Saucepan', or to the escaping American slaves, 'The Drinking Gourd', is prominent in his sky.

Starry night over the Rhône

Self portrait with felt hat

Langlois Bridge at Arles

The bedroom at Arles

The Yellow House ('The Street')

After virtually a whole day in the Van Gogh Museum, we went back across to the Rijksmuseum, to the garden outside, where there is a display of sculptures by the Catalan artist Joan Miró. They fall into two groups — large bronzes of rounded shapes reminiscent of the shapes in his paintings, and brightly coloured assemblages of found objects. We have been meeting Miró at various places during our journeyings, and just couldn't pass up this opportunity.

The garden itself is a lovely place. There is one tree there, a wingnut, that is listed as a historical monument. It was planted in 1907 by the original architect of the Rijksmuseum, Pierre Cuypers.

After this, the day was done, so we made our way back to the van.

Distance driven — today, nil; to date, 29,021 miles ( 46,705 km )