A C. T U. A L. L Y

When we visited the Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, we stayed in Utrecht, a lovely university town a 30-minute train ride away.   While there for the long Easter weekend, we spent time wandering the town and then spent the Sunday holiday at Keukenhof , Holland’s largest flower garden.   Utrecht is one of our favorite Dutch towns, and I posted about it here in 2019: Utrecht post .  W e never tire of the place and always find something new.  Our hotel (below) was across the street from the Saturday flower market. We bought some tulips, and the concierge gave us a champagne bucket to keep them fresh. They made it home! Just around the corner from our hotel was an Art Nouveau wine bar called Ruby Rose, where we had dinner. Utrecht is full of canals and Golden Age architecture, buzzing with a university (below) vibe and bees visiting the apple blossoms.   We caught this crew competition on one of the main canals that run through the downtown. Bu...

Our entry time to the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (above) was at 9:30 pm last Saturday.   At that late weekend hour, we had the place practically to ourselves. The 27 works ( The Girl with a Pearl Earring had been returned to Mauritshuis at the end of March) were displayed over at least 10 rooms, so there was no difficulty in examining the paintings closely.   The show has been sold out for months, but you can take a virtual tour of the exhibition produced by the Rijksmuseum and narrated by Stephen Fry here .   There have been many articles written about this once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of 28 of Vermeer’s 37 known works, but the article I found the most intriguing is this one from The Guardian .   What caught my interest were the author’s references to “immaculate,” “madonnas,” “sacred,” “grace,” and “annunciations” with respect to the women in some of Vermeer’s domestic interiors.   Indeed, if you see these women as secular madonnas receivin...