The morning after seeing Keukenhof, we walked to the Rijksmuseum, arriving a half hour before opening time. After purchasing the Amsterdam museum card, we hurried to the Gallery of Honor, which has masterpieces of the 17th century, before large tour groups mobbed the popular paintings.
Above the Rijksmuseum and the two-meter-tall I amsterdam logo at Museumplein.
We found two notable pieces from the National Galleries of Scotland exhibit showing at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.
The above Lady Agnew of Locknaw by John Singer Sargent is wonderful. A dark-haired beauty stares right at you. The bottom of her gown is painted with long brush strokes, as if it’s out of focus. The bottom of her gown is closer than her face. This short depth-of-field is a photographic technique that brings the viewer’s attention to the subject’s face. The sign for the painting noted that the 27-year-old Lady Agnew was “convalescing from nervous exhaustion”. Perhaps being young, beautiful, rich, and titled was too much for her to handle? 😉
The other notable work is Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. We wouldn’t have found the painting interesting if it weren’t labeled as being a Vermeer. The head of the seated Mary is nice, especially her head scarf. Much of the rest of the painting seems coarse by comparison. At 1.60 m x 1.42 m, it’s large for a Vermeer. There’s a theory that Vermeer used mirrors to assist his painting. Perhaps Vermeer used this technique paint a small section with Mary and then completed the painting the old-fashioned way.
Rescuing Da Vinci tells the story of art seized by the Germans during World War II and how the art was recovered by a special group. Rescuing Da Vinci is the basis for the movie The Monuments Men.
As a young man, Adolf Hitler applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna but was rejected. Later, as the leader of Germany, he dreamed of establishing an art museum in his birthplace, Linz, Austria.
As Germany conquered countries during World War II, Hitler had units hunt down and collect art. Many European museums prepared before hostilities started by closing and moving their art to hiding places.
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is included in the book, but the painting was never seized by the Germans. Like many other pieces owned by the Louvre, it was packed up and hidden. The French moved it six times during the war to evade seizure.
Art held by private collectors didn’t fare as well. For example, Vermeer’s The Astronomer was owned by a Jewish banker in Paris, and the Germans seized it. The Astronomer was eventually found it a mine in Austria and returned to the owner. The painting was subsequently sold to the French government as part of a settlement of inheritance taxes, and it now hangs in The Louvre.
Rescuing Da Vinci has lots of good pictures of World War II to help tell the story. Two paintings by Hitler aren’t bad; photos of devastated German cities are sad. The book discusses one da Vinci painting rescued. Shown on the book cover, it was in Poland and unknown to me, so the title is a stretch. The story is decent but less dramatic than the movie. Rescuing Da Vinci will appeal to folks who saw the movie and want to learn more, but there’s not much more because most of the best art was successfully secreted away.
We visited the Exploratorium on March 14, taking advantage of free admission on Pi Day. The Exploratorium is a San Francisco museum that fosters learning about science through hands-on exhibits. March 14 is 3.14 using dot notation, and 3.14 is a short approximation for pi, a mathematical constant that equals the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter. So March 14 is pi day. Cute idea, and the free admission persuaded us to attend.
Shown below, the museum organized a parade celebrating pi, showing pi to 500 digits. The blue sign with “pi day” leads the parade, followed by photo of Einstein, who was born on 3.14. Then two adults holding a 3 and probably a decimal point, facing away from us. The next digits are 14159 26535 89793 2. It’s tough to get people interested in an abstract number like pi. The 500 parade people got a slice of pi(e), along with the next 1,000 people. These was also a pizza pie demo. The Exploratorium people certainly tried hard!
The Exploratorium is on the San Francisco bay. The patio has a great view of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena Island, and Treasure Island on the far left.
My favorite exhibit is the camera obscura, an ancient type of optical instrument that projects an image of the surrounding landscape onto a surface inside a small chamber. The white structure below is a camera obscura, a small, light-proof chamber that you walk into.
Here’s the image projected inside the camera obscura — the bay, bay bridge, and ferry — the view from the patio. Of course, the ferry moved in the projected image.
As you can see, the camera obscura projects an image of the outside world onto a surface inside. In Vermeer’s Camera, the theory is that Johannes Vermeer used a camera obscura to aid his painting. He could trace the projected image to start his painting.
When you can see a scientific concept in front of you, it’s much more real and understandable than reading a book. That’s the idea behind the hands-on exhibits of the Exploratorium.
From Strasbourg we caught a train to Frankfurt. We considered Heidelberg, but chose Frankfurt for its art and shorter travel time to Nuremberg, our final destination.
We started with the Städel Museum and walked to the Christmas market. During World War II, the Städel collection was moved to Bavaria, where it was found by an American Monuments unit tracking down art.
In After the Luncheon by Renoir, the seated actress is lost in thought during a lull in the conversation, after lunch with a satisfied gentleman.
Vermeer’s The Geographer is one of only three paintings signed by the artist. As usual, a window on the left illuminates the room with nice shadows. Saturated colors in this picture, unlike those at other museums, where lights and reflections off glass diminished the photo. As usual, I boosted the ISO in order to obtain the right exposure, in this case 1/40 second at f/7.1.
Botticelli has a way drawing young women. According to wikipedia, Simonetta Vespucci was a great beauty beloved by the nobility of Florence despite her marriage. Per his wishes, Sandro Botticelli was eventually buried at her feet.
After the museum, we walked along the Main River to the city center. These bare, pollarded trees remind me of some van Gogh drawings we admired years ago. The path and trees illustrate perspective and vanishing point.
The Frankfurt city center is across the Main, with the Dom (cathedral) on the right. The lights on the riverbank are Christmas market stalls.
At the recent David Hockney exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, we noticed Hockney’s theory that the painter Johannes Vermeer used optical device to assist in his paintings.
Vermeer is famous for his realistic paintings of people with very precise lighting, and our posts show Vermeer paintings at The Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum. Vermeer painted in the 17th century, producing fewer than 3 dozen paintings when he died at the age of 43. In debt when he died, Vermeer wasn’t popular during his lifetime, and little is known about him. He fathered 15 children, with 11 surviving. It’s hard to imagine anyone showing such painstaking attention to detail with so many children underfoot.
Richard Steadman, a professor at University College London wrote Vermeer’s Camera, in which he suggests that Vermeer uses an optical device and then evaluates his own theory. Of course, he finds that his theory is sound.
Many of Vermeer’s paintings, such as The Astronomer, show people indoors, lit by light from windows on the left. This could reflect Vermeer’s atelier, or it could indicate the use of an optical device that wasn’t easily transported.
Steadman calculates the room shape and size from various paintings, based on geometry and vanishing points, and finds that Vermeer was very precise and correct in depicting walls, objects, and floor tiles across his paintings. He argues that this consistency would be difficult to achieve without some sort of aid.
For example, the edges of the floor tiles in The Glass of Wine (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) converge on two vanishing points. See how the size and angle changes for tiles that are more distant. And similarly for Allegory of the Catholic Faith. Of course, perspective was well-known in Vermeer’s time. Implementing perspective would take time by hand, and it would be free with an optical device.
Steadman discusses what sort of optical device Vermeer might have used to project the image of the room onto his drawing surface. Steadman points out that Vermeer’s paintings exhibit depth of field, a photography concept where objects within a range are in focus and objects outside that range are out of focus. In The Lacemaker (Louvre), the red threads in the foreground are fuzzy. With the simple lenses of the 17th century, we’d expect a narrow depth of field, where foreground is fuzzy. In contrast, indoor paintings, such as a still life, usually show everything in focus, because the human eye will refocus on the objects being observed, so that object is in focus. The painter paints what he sees, and whatever he looks at is in focus.
One argument is whether the optics of Vermeer’s day would be adequate to construct such a optical device. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who created a microscope and first saw single-cell organisms, lived near Vermeer and was appointed executor of Vermeer’s estate. There is no record that the two communicated, but it’s possible.
To test the hypothesis that Vermeer used an optical device, Tim Jenison, a Texas inventor, created an optical device and a room from a Vermeer painting owned by the English royal family. He then used the device to recreate the painting. This process and painting is the subject of the documentary movie Tim’s Vermeer, released in February.
All this shows that the theory is consistent with Vermeer’s paintings, but we still don’t know what Vermeer did in the 17th century.
After a refreshing lunch, we tried to tackle the rest of the Louvre in an afternoon, a daunting task. To save time, we ate at a restaurant at the Louvre and enjoyed I. M. Pei’s pyramid that opened up a underground museum entrance.
Guided by the Louvre’s map, we tried to see our favorite art before our feet gave out. We enjoy marble statues, especially after our visit to Rome. Michelangelo’s slaves:
Canova’s Pysche Revived By Cupid’s Kiss. A museum patron happily takes it all in, while a second looks away.
And the incomparable Venus de Milo. The bright sunlight through a window overwhelms the side in shadow, so the shadow side is too dark without a fill flash or reflector. But perhaps the picture is stronger this way — art versus craft. Whatever the answer, this Greek woman has shaped the ideals of western beauty for centuries.
No visit to the Louvre would be complete without da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, despite the crowds and glare off the protective glass.
And some personal favorites:
Vermeer is noted for his scarce, photo-realistic paintings.
After visiting The Cloisters we walked through Central Park to visit the Metropolitan Museum, since our admission for The Cloisters is valid for the Met on the same day.
We took the subway down Manhattan, bought lunch, and walked across Central Park to the Met. Our walk across Central Park was anything but a walk in the park, an English expression that means something easy and pleasant. We got lost several times on the roads and paths that twist and turn through Central Park.
We watched turtles swimming. The water looks milky, but it’s the reflection of white clouds and blue sky in the water. The reflections of tree branches are in the right-hand corners.
The water is actually green from algae, as you’ll see in the next picture.
The Lake provides a calm spot in the middle of the bustling metropolis. The surrounding buildings provide great views of the green space. The far side of the lake has a granite outcropping, one of many left from glaciers in the last ice age. The granite bedrock is shallow here and at the southern tip of Manhattan, which is why skyscrapers are built in both areas but not between the two areas, where the bedrock is deeper. Long Island was formed from the debris scraped off by glaciers and left behind when they receded.
When we arrived at the Met, we had less than two hours before the 5:15 closing time. We’d have to be very selective.
We started with the Islamic collection, to follow up on seeing the Alhambra and Shangri La this year. The Alhambra and Beijing’s Forbidden City are palaces stripped of the royal furnishings and articles that once filled them.
This reception room from Damascus, Syria, has a fountain and wood paneling decorated with calligraphy and intricate patterns.
This walnut chest has ivory inlays.
The Met has five Vermeers, more than any other museum.
Finally, one of our favorites is this bronze by Edgar Degas.
The Best 5 Years 