Netherlands – Unravel Travel

Groningen

After cycling to (and around) Amsterdam, I put the bike on a train (three, in fact) to Groningen, to make a flying visit to this relatively remote part of the Netherlands that I’d not seen before. It’s flat (of course) and agricultural, and quieter than the Randstad, the area between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and the North Sea that is the economic powerhouse of the Netherlands. Groningen is the country’s largest city north of Amsterdam, and a major educational centre (perhaps a quarter of the populace are students), so there’s plenty to do in the evenings.

I was drawn particularly by the Groningen Museum, a post-modern riot opened in 1994 which covers both art and a bit of local history. There’s a small but excellent display of 25 archeological and historical objects which (in the style of Neil MacGregor) illustrate the area’s entire history from 10,000 BC (when reindeer hunters wandered across much of what is now the North Sea) via a brief Roman incursion, to medieval Christianity (when there were at least thirty monasteries here), conversion to Calvinism and then a brutal assault by the Bishop of Münster in 1672. There was also a larger display (temporary, I think) covering the city’s liberation in April 1945, by units with strange names such as the Fort Garry Horse – the Canadians stuck to the left flank of the allied armies after D-Day, pushing up the coast, which explains why so many Dutch girls migrated to Canada immediately after the war, and not to Britain or the USA. The regular Wehrmacht troops defending Groningen soon gave up but the SS did not and there was heavy fighting for four days before the city was liberated; unfortunately the civilian population insisted on coming out to meet their liberators (often bearing coffee and snacks) and many were caught in crossfire, no fewer than 110 being killed (and just 43 Canadians).

On the art side, they’ve always been keen to be controversial, as in a 1996 poster of a woman peeing into a man’s mouth. It’s not immediately obvious, but in the West Pavilion there’s a fine little collection of Old Master paintings from Northern Europe, with lots of portraits of worthies (one by Cranach the Elder), a tiny Adoration of the Magi by Rubens and his sketch for a painting for Antwerp Town Hall (now in the Prado in Madrid), and a Man in a Helmet by the Circle of Rembrandt. There’s also lots of silver, and works by HW Mesdag and Jozef Israëls, who were both born in Groningen but moved south to become members of the Den Haag School of realist painters.

In the twentieth century Groningen was known for a group of painters known as De Ploeg, meaning both The Plough and The Team. Founded in 1918, they were influenced by Van Gogh and then by Expressionism – Jan Wiegers travelled to Davos in 1920 and met Kirchner, and he, Alida Pott, her husband George Martens, Jan Altink, Johann Dijkstra and Hendrik Werkmann (who was active in the resistance and was shot by the Nazis just three days before Groningen was liberated) all produced excellent work. Another pavilion, displaying Applied Arts, was designed by Philippe Starck, with lots of gauze curtains; there’s an eclectic range of beautiful domestic items, for those that care about such things.

The Groninger Museum has an outpost called Wall House #2 that I would have liked to visit, but it’s only open at weekends. It’s a very striking modernist house that was designed in the 1970s by New York architect John Quentin Hejduk, who had designed the original Wall House for a site in Connecticut, although it was never built. However Groningen’s city planners had the very clever idea of building it here, and it was completed in 2001, the year of Hajduk’s death. Another museum worth a look is the Northern Maritime Museum, in two fifteenth-century buildings in the city centre.

The north side of the Grote Markt (the main square) and some of the east side were destroyed in the fighting of 1945 and have largely been rebuilt, but with some very striking modern intrusions, notably The Forum Groningen just to the east of the square. It’s a cultural centre consisting of a library, an arthouse cinema, an outpost of the Groninger Museum, a tourist information office (called the Groninger Store), and bars and a rooftop terrace – it opened in 2019, after a two-year delay due to a risk of earthquakes after decades of natural gas extraction in the region. At the north-eastern corner of the square is the Martinitoren (St Martin’s Tower – nothing to do with James Bond’s favourite drink), a massive belfry, built in 1469-82, that dwarves the attached St Martin’s church. It’s possible to go up the 97-metres-high tower for views of the city – book at the Groningen Store.

The Forum Groningen and the Martinitoren

Diagonally opposite it is the Stadhuis (City Hall, 1775-1810), the Neoclassical façade of which was hidden behind a screen with the image of that same façade on it – clearly some refurbishment work is going on behind. Then I saw the Korenbeurs (Grain Exchange), just to the west on the Aakerkhof, another Neoclassical building hidden by a screen bearing an image of… you guessed it. More refurbishment going on. The adjacent Aakerk (now used for concerts and events) is interesting because Groningen’s river is called the A, but the riverside quarter’s church is the Aakerk, for some odd linguistic reason.

There’s more redevelopment going on out in the western suburbs, where the Suikerfabriek (Sugar Factory) site has been taken over by a range of alternative and youth-oriented cultural organisations, including lively bars and restaurants in and outside the former industrial buildings, and others such as the Rebel Rebel Hostel in stacked shipping containers. There was also a Ferris Wheel when I was there, but I don’t know if it’s permanent. Modern buildings are going up at the east end of Suikerlaan (by the ring road), and I imagine there’s pressure to develop the whole site. For the time being, see here (Dutch only) to know what’s going on; and if there’s nothing at the sugar factory, try the pudding factory or the machine factory, nearer the city centre. The liveliest student bars are on the Grote Markt, Poelestraat, the Vismarkt and Peperstraat – look out for beer from Baxbier Brewery (English info here and here) or De Prael.

The best restaurants are by the canal just east of the centre, such as De Smederi, Eetcafé ‘t Zwarte Schaap and 2 Jongens uit Groningen eetcafé – when I was there they were all short-staffed but full (be sure to book) and none were great for vegetarians. Just west of the centre, Pizza Napoli is big and full of students, known for its well-loaded pizzas, and of course fine for vegetarians.

Getting around Groningen in a green way

Around 60% of all journeys in Groningen are done by bike and 57% of residents cycle to work – this is one of the highest levels in the world, but to be honest Groningen felt to me much like any other Dutch city in this respect. There’s plenty of good cycle infrastructure, but the key has been modal filtering, or Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, which have become a bit of a dirty word (ok, phrase) in the UK thanks to the machinations of the right-wing fossil fuel lobby. In fact people can get anywhere by car (and car ownership is pretty high in the Netherlands), but not necessarily by the most direct route, whereas of course cyclists and pedestrians can go directly to their destinations, and the filtered streets are peaceful and people-friendly.

At least half the buses in and around Groningen are electric (you may see them charging their batteries via roof-mounted pantographs at some terminals) and hydrogen-powered buses are also being introduced – by 2030 the province’s bus fleet should be 100% carbon dioxide-free. Meanwhile in April 2021 Arriva started introducing a fleet of WINK (Wandelbarer Innovativer Nahverkehrs-Kurzzug or Convertible innovative short train for local transport) trains on the unelectrified rail network around Groningen – these are fuelled by vegetable oil that has been used for cooking, while in 2024 hydrogen-powered trains will also enter service on the line from Leer in Germany. When I left Groningen for Bremen, I took this route, but had to transfer to a bus to cross the border from Weener to Leer (fortunately I had a folding bike) – this was because the Friesen bridge, across the Ems river, was destroyed by a ship in 2015. Only in mid-2021 was a final agreement reached to replace it by 2024, at a cost of €125 million, about double the initial estimates – the opening will be wider than before, and there’ll also be a pedestrian and cycle track.

[I’ll add more photos when WordPress decides to play nicely – for some reason I can only add small blurry photos at the moment.]

Amsterdam

I’ve been to Amsterdam a few times before, mainly to see the art (and the cycling provision), and I rather assumed that this visit would be similar – and yes, I did visit the main museums and galleries, but I was also sidetracked a bit by architecture and design. But first – continuing the theme of my recent visits to Oxford and Leiden – Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. One of the world’s greatest art collections, the Rijksmuseum was famously closed for a whole decade (2003-13), twice as long as planned, to modernise the building and reorganise the displays to give more historical perspective (as at the Lakenhal) – only Rembrandt’s The Night Watch still hangs in its historic position at one end of the Gallery of Honour, the grand top-floor space where the finest works of the Golden Age hang, including more Rembrandts, and three of the world’s 34 Vermeers. One of the Rembrandts is of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Draper’s Guild, who were responsible for checking the standards of dyed cloth, just as in the Lakenhal in Leiden. The Night Watch, incidentally, was cut down on three sides (mainly the left) in 1715 when it was moved from Kloveniersdoelen (the civic guard’s shooting range) to the City Hall – the original is known from a copy by Gerrit Lundens (c1642-55), currently on loan from the National Gallery in London.

They’ve also produced excellent audioguides and apps – there’s an infuriating photo that pops up on Facebook from time to time, of a school group looking at phones instead of The Night Watch, posted by people who don’t actually have any understanding of how smartphones are used – they’re not texting their friends, you idiots, they’re using the Rijksmuseum educational app. And of course I like the cycleway that cuts right through the building too.

I also came across quite a few more painters from Haarlem that I didn’t mention in my previous post (Gaertgen tot Sint-Jans, Jan Jansz Mostaert, Jan van Scorel, Floris van Dyck, Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), as well as maritime paintings, Italian drawings, dolls houses and model ships (with good coverage of Dutch colonialism and slavery). Finally, from the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, there are largely realist paintings from the Den Haag School (notably Hendrik Mesdag), Dutch Impressionists such as Johan Jongkind, George Breitner and Isaac Israels, as well as Jan Toorop, who started as an Impressionist but moved on to Symbolism and Art Nouveau, a couple of Van Goghs and an early Mondrian (and early Mondrian is /very/ different from the famous abstract Mondrian). There’s also some French art, by Courbet, Monet, Emile Bernard and Monticelli, and a Whistler.

Of course, there’s also the Rembrandt House, where he lived from 1639 to 1656, which features a recreation of a period interior and paintings by Rembrandt’s contemporaries – there are etchings by the man himself, but no paintings.

Just south of the Rijksmuseum on Museumplein, the Stedelijk Museum continues the story with modern and contemporary art – it was also closed for the best part of a decade (2004-12), having failed a fire inspection, and an extension like a huge white bathtub was added in front of the original 1895 building. The extension houses a superb display of the permanent collection – where the Lakenhal and the Rijksmuseum integrate art with history, here it’s art and design that are integrated, with furniture and in particular chairs displayed alongside contemporaneous paintings and sculpture. When I got to Copenhagen a couple of weeks later, I was amused to read about the Design Museum’s gallery on ‘The Danish Chair’ – yes, of course, Danish design is iconic, but the concept of the minimalist chair made of modern materials originated in the Netherlands in 1917 with Gerrit Rietveld and De Stijl, followed by Marcel Breuer and Mies van de Rohe at the Bauhaus in Germany. In fact the technology to make bentwood chairs was developed in Vienna as early as 1842 and adopted by the Wiener Werkstätte group, who were inspired by Ruskin, Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement.

The art starts with Cézanne, Matisse, Braque and Chagall, as well as photography by Paul Strand, and both early (figurative) and mature (abstract) paintings by Mondrian. Charley Toorop, a friend of Mondrian’s, was every bit as good and interesting as her father, but was not attached to any particular school or movement. The Russian avant-garde is well represented, especially Malevich, as well as a Dutch version of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) group. Postwar art is mainly American (Elsworth Kelly, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, George Segal, Richard Serra), as well as de Kooning, who moved from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam, sorry, New York. There are appearances from non-Americans such as Yves Klein, Tinguely, Bacon, Agnes Martin, Christo, Gordon Matta-Clark (Land of Milk & Honey – made of… you guessed it), and a very atypical Nikki de St-Phalle (and Gilbert and George famously spent a day on the stairs here as living sculptures in 1969). Upstairs the art is more contemporary and less familiar to me (but for once I don’t feel that this is contemporary art with the stress on ‘con’) – Nan Goldin and Grayson Perry are names I know, and Nam June Paik, whose TV Buddha, created back in 1974, was the first item in the Stedelijk’s ‘time-based video’ collection (which apparently now accounts for no less than half of the museum’s holdings); Dara Birnbaum was new to me but is another interesting video artist. The original building now houses temporary shows of generally high quality.

Next door, the Van Gogh Museum also has a modern addition, with a ticket hall and shop added in 2015 from which you pass through a tunnel and up into the older building. In a fairly short career, van Gogh really did produce a lot of great work, including, of course, searching self-portraits, which provide another link to Rembrandt. It struck me that, although loosely categorised as a Postimpressionist, Vincent was one of those figures who always sticks out – rather like Baudelaire, I thought – and doesn’t fit tidily into any group. In addition to masterpieces such as Sunflowers, The Yellow House, Wheatfield with Crows, and Almond Blossom, the museum holds half of his almost 1100 drawings, and you’ll also see paintings by Monet (Tulip Fields near Den Haag), Denis and Vlaminck, as well as Vuillard, Van Dongen, Munch and Gabriele Münter, all influenced by van Gogh.

I also visited, for the first time I think, the Amsterdam Museum, which gives a great overview of the city’s history but also includes more art – no Rembrandts, and only a copy of Hals’s famous portrait of Descartes, but others by Rachel Ruysch (the city’s leading female artist in the seventeenth century, who I wasn’t aware of but came across again in Bremen and Hamburg), van der Helst, Flinck, Bol and Van Honthorst, and from more recent times George Hendrik Breitner and (early) Mondrian. Their estimate is that three million paintings were produced in Amsterdam during the Golden Age (essentially, the seventeenth century).

Flammekueche with a Thai Thai Tripel from Oedipus Brewing, at the Tolhuistuin – all recommended.

There was also a temporary exhibition on beer and brewing in Amsterdam, which (as in Leiden) had been very important back in the days when the cloth industry was polluting the waterways, and plenty of brewers were also mayors of Amsterdam. From the late nineteenth century, however, nothing but mass-produced pilsner was available, and the Dutch seemed pretty happy with this until very recently, despite the totally different and far more interesting beer culture just south in Belgium. The first speciality beer bar, Gollem, opened in 1974, and the first microbrewery, Brouwerij ‘t IJ, in 1985 – both now have a couple of branches. There are now at least forty breweries and almost 800 beer cafés in Amsterdam, producing a fantastic range of both Belgian-style and British/American beers; personally I enjoyed the local IPAs, which were sharpish but not too floral or citrusy. With roots in the 1980s squatting scene (which was and is very influential), many of them are socially and environmentally committed, employing the disadvantaged and, in the case of De Prael, making beer from rainwater (1200 litres of water produces 1000 litres of Code Blond). Troost uses their spent grain to make bread, while all other waste gets transformed into energy. The ‘ginaissance’ is, naturally, occurring here too, and bars that specialise in jenever, the ancestor of gin, are doing well.

The museum also pointed me towards various interesting housing developments and other urban design projects which were world-leading at the time and are still visually striking. The population of Amsterdam doubled between 1870 and 1900 and there was an urgent need for affordable and hygienic housing – grandiose plans were drawn up for Haussmannesque boulevards, but meanwhile slumlords started throwing up cheap overcrowded tenements. The one exception (until the Housing Act of 1902) was the De Pijp district (The Pipe, perhaps named after a ditch that was drained in 1891), which has been the city’s hippest district since the ’60s. Its southern extension, the Nieuwe Pijp (1921-29), was part of the Plan Zuid urban expansion plan drawn up in 1917 by Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934), known as ‘the father of modern Dutch architecture’. In the 1890s he designed the Beurs van Berlage (Commodities Exchange) and what is now the Swissôtel, both on Damrak, but later moved to broader urban planning, inspiring the younger architects of the Amsterdam School (roughly 1910-30) to fill in the details. Their style is hard to pin down but it draws on Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), the English Arts and Crafts movement (along with Charles Rennie Macintosh from Scotland) and Art Deco to produce a kind of brick expressionism, using sculptural brick and stonework to decorate inside and out, creating something like a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), including designing furniture and lighting. It’s linked to the Chilehaus and similar buildings in Hamburg, which I saw a few days later.

I started by viewing the Scheepvaarthuis or Shipping House (1913-6,

built as headquarters for six shipping companies and now the Grand Hotel Amrâth), which is renowned as the first major building produced by the Amsterdam School; then I cycled east to the Indische Buurt, so called because the streets are named after places in Indonesia. This area was built on a former polder between 1900 and 1930, with five apartment blocks on the south side of Javaplein designed by Berlage in 1915-6; also on Javaplein is a striking public bathhouse built in 1941 and now a restaurant. There was a citywide programme to build bathhouses from 1919 to 1931, but in fact this one was not built until 1941. For me the most attractive social housing was on the other side of the city, to the west on Spaarndammerplantsoen, where a museum in Het Schip (known as The Workers’ Palace, built in 1919), gives insights into the Amsterdam School’s work. Similar movements occurred in Vienna and Berlin (and of course London), where industrialisation brought huge numbers of people to the city, but the Amsterdam version does have its own charm.

Nowadays industry has given way to a process of regeneration, partly of course in the docklands, as in every similar city around the world, but also the Western Gasworks, via which I arrived in the city, and various sites across the IJ river in Amsterdam-Noord, such as the NDSM shipyard – here there are an abandoned submarine, a lightship and trams, all adapted to new uses (vegan street-food cafés, craft ale bars and spaces for music and theatre), and a hotel in a giant crane. Using shipping containers for cafés or accommodation is of course a given.

And naturally there’s graffiti, or street art as we should call it – in October, just after my visit, the STRAAT museum opened in one of the NDSM hangars – but surely if street art is displayed indoors in a gallery it ceases to be street art?

I should finish by stressing that there are frequent free ferries from Amsterdam Centraal station and elsewhere to NDSM – at busy times these are swamped by cyclists, along with vehicles for the disabled and a few mopeds, and there’s now talk of a tunnel under the IJ, with spiral ramps and pedestrian escalators.

Sweets ‘dispersed hotel’, with rooms in about 30 bridge houses.

Leiden and Haarlem

My one excursion outside the UK in this plague year was a five-week trip with a bike in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, which was bookended by commemorations of two great geniuses – Rembrandt and Beethoven. I started with the ferry from Harwich to Hoek van Holland and an easy ride through the edges of Den Haag to Leiden, where Rembrandt was born and grew up. Last year Leiden’s Lakenhal Museum, with the Ashmolean in Oxford, put on a Young Rembrandt exhibition, which finished in February and moved to Oxford, where it was promptly closed down by Covid-19. I thought I’d missed it but it did reopen, hurrah! Because I was actually booked to visit the Lakenhal at the end of the week it seemed totally auspicious that I should go to Oxford to see the show first – it was excellent, very well presented, and a great prelude to my visit to Leiden. Young Rembrandt covered his first twenty-five years in Leiden, before he moved to Amsterdam (where I was to see far more of his wonderful paintings a few days later). In Leiden he shared a studio with his friend Jan Lievens – I wasn’t particularly aware of him before this trip, but I saw quite a few really very striking paintings by him on this trip, including in Bremen and Braunschweig.

The Fitzwilliam Museum here in Cambridge has a fantastic collection of Rembrandt prints, so I’m used to seeing them in rotating displays (often comparing different states of the same image, depending on how the artist altered it and how worn the plate was), but very few featured in this show.

Lakenhal is usually translated as Cloth Hall, but Laken is specifically worsted, one of the seven main kinds of cloth brought to be inspected here. A fine building dating from 1640, it now houses the town’s main museum, which was closed for remodelling and extension from 2016 to 2019 and now combines its art and history collections to good effect. Isaac Claesz Swanenburg’s paintings of the cloth-making process are hardly great art, but they are informative. In recent posts about England I mentioned the wealth brought by the wool trade, which funded the building of big churches with great expanses of late-Gothic windows; much the same happened here, and the cloth trade was also key to the wealth of the Hanseatic ports, as you’ll see when I get to my post on Lübeck in a month or two.

The Lakenhal’s art collection per se is excellent, starting with an unusual Last Judgment by Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), who was the town’s most famous artist (more an engraver than a painter) until Rembrandt’s rise, and continuing with well-known names such as Jan van Goyen (who specialised in local landscapes), Willem van de Velde (the leading marine painter of the late seventeenth century), Gabriel Metsu and the genre painter Jan Steen. The Leidse Fijnschilders or Leiden Fine Painters were led by Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou but harked back to a pre-Rembrandt era with their small, finely detailed paintings, which are less attractive to modern eyes. There’s also modern art, thanks to Theo van Doesburg, who moved to Leiden in 1916 and established the magazine De Stijl (with Piet Mondrian and others) in 1917.

Anyway, Leiden is a lovely town with a renowned university, a huge church, and other museums, notably the Volkenkunde Museum, opened in 1937 in the former university hospital. As the National Museum of Ethnology, this has since 2014 been part of the the National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW), grouped together with the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal and Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum (a colonial-era museum that was until then run by the Royal Tropical Institute); since 2017 the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam has also been a partner of the NMVW. It’s full of treasures from around the world, but especially Asia, notably pieces collected at the trading station at Nagasaki (when Japan was otherwise closed to the outside world), and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); however a newly adopted policy of unconditional return of cultural objects that were seized without due process may see the collection shrinking somewhat. The museum is in the Singelpark or Belt Park, created in 2019 by stringing together existing green spaces (with six new footbridges) the whole way around the canal ring that surrounds the city centre. This was the city’s main line of defence (you’ll learn about the 1574 siege in the Lakenhal) and if you walk the whole 6km loop you’ll pass the two remaining city gates and the Molen de Valk, the high windmill that is a symbol of the city.

Leiden is also marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the departure of the Pilgrim Fathers to America – it’s often forgotten that having left England they spent twelve years in Leiden, before deciding to move on – in 1620 they sailed from Delft to Southampton, and then only stopped in Dartmouth and Plymouth because Mayflower was leaking. It’s an odd coincidence that I had a look around the town of Harwich before catching my ferry to the Netherlands, and discovered that Mayflower is believed to have been built there, and her master, Christopher Jones, lived there; there’s also an information panel about Christopher Newport of Harwich, who commanded the ships that carried the first settlers in 1607 to Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.

The Leiden American Pilgrim Museum is in a fourteenth-century house with furnishings from the Pilgrim period and maps and engravings illustrating the events of that time. The Pilgrims were associated with the huge Pieterskerk, founded in 1121, and their leader John Robinson is buried there (as is the painter Jan Steen); a plaque facing the church marks Robinson’s home.

Haarlem, just a couple of hours north of Leiden by bike (all on off-road cycleways, of course), is also associated with one major painter – what Rembrandt was to Leiden, Frans Hals was to Haarlem. (And of course there was also Vermeer in Delft, but I didn’t go there on this trip, as I’ve spent time in the Rotterdam/Delft/Den Haag area relatively recently.) Twice the size of Leiden, it’s close enough to Amsterdam to almost be a suburb, and has even more museums than Leiden (15 by my count), as well as fascinating early twentieth-century architecture. However the Frans Hals Museum merged in 2018 with De Hallen Haarlem – officially still the Frans Hals Museum, its two locations are known as Hof and Hal (buying a ticket for one gives free entry to the other, but you currently have to book time slots online due to the pandemic). Hal, right on the Grote Markt, is a good contemporary art gallery (the collection includes Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Andrea Fraser), but the one not to miss is Hof, a ten-minute walk south.

You have to build up to Hals himself by passing through several rooms of paintings by other Haarlem portraitists, such as Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), Pieter Pietersz (1540-1603), Karel van Mander (1548-1606), Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem (1562–1638) and Frans Pietersz de Grebber (c1573-1649). Some were born in Antwerp and moved to the free Netherlands to escape the stifling regime in Spanish Flanders (now Belgium), others moved from Haarlem to Amsterdam, matching the general trend of the time as Amsterdam became a major centre of global trade. Hals himself was born in Antwerp in about 1582 but was brought to Haarlem as an infant and refused to leave, obliging his clients in Amsterdam to come to him towards the end of his life (he didn’t die until 1666). All six of his group portraits of civic guards, with which Hals made his name, are here, along with portraits of assorted worthies, in a freer style than his contemporaries, becoming positively slapdash in his 80s (as with Rembrandt, this creates a fine effect at a distance, but looks messy close up). His younger brother Dirck Hals (1593-1656) was not nearly as good an artist and largely confined to himself to painting ‘merry company’ scenes for wealthy young clients. Of his successors and students, I was most interested by Judith Leyster (1609-60) whose works used to be confused with those of Hals himself – I was not aware of her before, but she was the leading female painter of her time, and well worth further study.

Later Haarlem artists who are still widely known include Pieter Claesz Borchem (c1597-1660), Salomon van Ruysdael (c1601-70), his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael (c1628-82), Adriaen van Ostade (1610-85), his brother Isaac van Ostade (1621-49), Philips Wouwerman (1619-68) and Willem Claesz Heda (1594-1680), who I wasn’t aware of but who is esteemed as a master of the still life paintings that were so popular with the Dutch middle class (and specifically of the ‘late breakfast’ genre, which I wasn’t aware of either…).

Across the road from Hof is the Haarlem Museum, which covers the city’s history with an interesting sideline in architecture. Immediately east of the centre, Teylers Museum is the first and oldest museum in the Netherlands, founded in 1778 and covering art, natural history and science. The Oval Room, opened in 1784, is a neoclassical jewel, and it’s continued to expand with painting galleries added in 1838 and 1892 and a new wing in 1996, finally expanding into the property next door in 2002. The paintings are mainly landscapes by the nineteenth-century Den Haag School which are not too exciting, but they also have prints and drawings by Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Raphael.

If you’re familiar with Dutch Golden Age landscape paintings, you’ll know that all these relatively small cities are dominated by a huge Gothic church, which of course were originally Roman Catholic; in Haarlem it’s St Bavo’s church (also known as the Grote Kerk), which should not be confused with the present Roman Catholic cathedral of Saint Bavo (1895-1930), an even huger edifice that appears unexpectedly as you arrive from the south. Built between 1370 and 1538, the Grote Kerk is known for the grave of Frans Hals, the models of ships hanging in the south transept, its floor composed almost entirely of gravestones (around 1,500 of them) and the massive organ (the world’s biggest when it was installed in 1738) that was played by Handel, Mozart (aged 10) and Mendelssohn. Not quite as dominant but still a very striking edifice is the former De Koepel prison, just east of the centre on Papentorenvest – a huge circular panopticon block (built so that a guard in the centre could have a view of every cell), it housed criminals from 1901 to 2016 and then briefly migrants from the Middle East; it is now being converted to house a university college.

I’ll write about beer in my next post, from Amsterdam, but it’s worth mentioning the Jopenkerk Brewery, which is known for its conversion of a former church into a popular café-bar, where they usually have twenty of their own beers on tap as well as guest beers; however brewery tours take place not here but at another brewery in the industrial area east of the centre.