Amsterdam

I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the self-portraits and found a room I had not expected at all. Five people round a table in a dark cottage, eating …

This is the boat. Cream hull, varnished timber window frames, lifebuoys strapped to the canopy, a Dutch flag at the bow, and along the side the registration and the capacity: twenty passengers. …

There is only one surviving portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh. It was taken in January 1873, when he was nineteen, before he had painted anything at all. A second photograph, long …

I went in expecting a tourist trap. A restaurant inside one of the busiest museums in Europe, named after the painter, with a captive audience of two million people a year who …

I was at the Rijksmuseum for the Night Watch, like almost everybody who books a ticket. That hangs at the far end of the Gallery of Honour, upstairs, and it is where …

A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I went up on King’s Day. That is the twenty-seventh of April, the loudest day of the Dutch year, and by early afternoon the canal below the brewery was full of boats …

I had walked through Vondelpark in Amsterdam several times before I ever ate there. In April the pond carries floating beds of tulips, planted on black rafts and set out across the …

I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …

I support Mercedes. I mention this because the last stretch of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam is essentially a shrine to a Red Bull driver, and I walked into it as a …

I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …