Photo Galleries
Amsterdam
August 2015
Amsterdam is a bustling city, full of art, culture, canals, tall old houses with fancy gables on top, bicycles, graffiti, souvenir shops, McDonalds, marijuana cafes, and, most of all, tourists. It's alternately grubby and charming, with something for every taste---a place where the hottest tickets in town are Madame Toussaud's wax museum, the Anne Frank House, and the Van Gogh Museum (our visit was focused on art, so we only saw the third one). Besides scenes of Amsterdam, here are some paintings from the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague to give you a taste of Dutch art from the Golden Age of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Amsterdam's premier art museum, the Rijksmuseum (built in 1885)
Interor courtyard of the Rijksmuseum
The Milkmaid by Vermeer
A portrait by Frans Hals
One of the few Renaissance portraits of Africans (an archer in the bodyguard of Emperor Charles V)
The Dutch have always loved their tulips (a drawing from 1640)
A plaque on the outside wall of an old orphanage (now the Amsterdam City Museum) asking passersby to donate to the orphanage
Chris tries out a breastplate and linen ruff (like in 17th century portraits) in the City Museum
Amsterdam is super crowded with tourists in August, especially (for some reason) with Italians
A graffiti artist at work in an alley
The Concert-Gebouw concert hall near our hotel
One of Amsterdam's Art Nouveau buildings (a former photography studio, now a cafe)
We loved the Art Nouveau owls!
A street near our hotel, with houses built mainly in the 1800s
Canal life on a sunny day
The wooden beams sticking out from canal houses are used to haul furniture up with a pulley and bring it in the windows, because the houses are too narrow, and the stairs too steep, to carry large objects upstairs
People rent canal boats for their parties
Houses from the 1680s
Amsterdam's Central Station, hub for trains, buses, and streetcars
Scenes from our cruise in the harbor and on the canals
Some Amsterdam residents live in houseboats rather than apartments (and grow their gardens on the roof)
Some of the houseboats look pretty ramshackle
The steeple of one of Amsterdam's many old churches
Bicycles are everywhere in Amsterdam
A huge bike parking garage next to Central Station
Some paintings from the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague: one of many, many still lives (this one notable for not having any dead animals in it)
Old Dutch artists loved creating fantasy still lives of flowers that bloomed at all different times of the year
A portrait by Hans Holbein of Jane Seymour, third wife of Britain's King Henry VIII
Henry VIII's master of falcons, by Holbein
Portait of a woman from southern Germany by Holbein
A late self-portrait by Rembrandt
Vermeer's largest painting: A View of Delft
Detail from Vermeer's View of Delft
Vermeer's iconic Girl with a Pearl Eaaring