This Week's Picture: Authentic

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Authentic - Do Not Touch

Bruce adjusts his vestments outside the
Amsterdam Museum of Bags and Purses

We're still aiming to make the most of our iAmsterdam cards.

The one important destination today was the Resistance Museum, which remembers the experience of Amsterdam's occupation by the Nazis from May 1940 to May 1945.

The other destinations were less significant, but scratched an itch I've had since we glimpsed the staggering wealth of Amsterdam's upper classes at the Rijksmuseum. I've been wondering how they lived.

Our first destination was the Amsterdam Museum of Handbags and Purses. It's a handbag version of the Gardiner Ceramic Museum, in that it is basically an extensive personal collection on display to the public.

What's impressive about the collection is the building the collection is housed in at Herengracht 573. Herengracht was the canal address of the city's super wealthy. If you were a merchant or a craftsman and you were doing well, you could buy a lot and build a house three windows wide. If you were even more wealthy, say a banker or a mayor, you could buy two lots and build a house five windows wide....

Herengracht 573 is a five window wide property that no one has lived in since the turn of the last century. For a hundred years, corporations used the address for their fancy offices. Then, in 2007, an anonymous benefactor bought the house (our conservative guess is 5 million euros) to serve as a space to display the personal collection of two brothers who had a thing for handbags.

I'm not making this up.

Photographs were not allowed in the collection, so you'll have to take my word that the space, dominated by a spectacular central staircase, was really something.

Next destination, just down the canal from 573 was the Willet-Holthuysen Museum at Herengracht 605. We didn't know anything about this place; it had not shown up in my research, but, when we walked by it, we figured we needed to go in.

Another five-window wide fine old home, the point of this museum is to show how rich people lived in Amsterdam.

From the second-storey window: the garden.

They lived well, surrounded by all their stuff, with secret passageways to avoid the servants. And sufficient wall space to hang huge pictures like those we saw at the 17th C Portraiture show at the Hermitage Amsterdam.

The Willet-Holthuysen Museum is roughly analogous to the Frick Museum in New York City, in that it is a family home full of the things the former owner thought precious. The big difference between the two is while the Frick contains some of the world's greatest masterpieces of Renaissance, Dutch and Baroque painting, the Willet-Holthuysen, not so much. The childless couple who owned the home both came from money and married when they were in their late 30's. They lived bon vivant lives, their love of the arts fuelled, evidently, by pedestrian taste.

The Museum of the Resistance is, oddly enough, another five-window-wide former abode, but this time the address is less interesting than what's inside.

What this card says: of the estimated 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, 107,000 were shipped off to work camps. Of those people, 5,300 survived. An estimated 25,000 went into hiding; of those people, 18,000 survived. According to the museum narrative, at the time, people wondered which path would provide the better chance of survival. In hindsight, the choice is clear.