I’ve been looking forward to seeing the reopened Rijksmuseum, having missed the opening this time last year.   It’s been discussed and debated for as long as I can remember, the plan to integrate art and Dutch history causing controversy when it was first proposed by Ronald de Leeuw.   He resigned five years into the project when it was delayed another five years by Dutch bicyclists wanting to retain their rite of passage through the centre of the building.  Duncan Bull, the curator of paintings, explained the background to the museum, which was founded out of the Catholic emancipation movement in the 1860s when Dutch ecclesiastical treasures were being exported, not least by Duveen’s father to England.   The King refused to open the original Cuypers building on the grounds that it looked like a monastery.   Duncan then took me on a whistlestop tour of the medieval collections, which looked as if they had been very beautifully displayed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte down in the vaulted undercroft originally used for the manufacture of plastercast copies, and then to the eighteenth-century galleries, sparser and less impressive, apart from the wonderful group of pastels by Jean-Etienne Liotard bequeathed to the Dutch state by Liotard’s granddaughter.   The official part of the trip was to the Gallery of Honour at the top of the building where we were able to contemplate Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Rembrandt’s Night Watch on our own. The picture which made a deep impression on me was The Oath Swearing of Claudia Civilis, which I now realise is on loan from the National Museum in Stockholm and which I must have seen in Stockholm. It’s so freely painted, in loose slabs of paint, and so savage.

When I had breakfast with John Morton Morris on Wednesday, he said ‘Oh, if only I had known you were going to Amsterdam, I could have arranged for you to go to Jan Six’s house’.   It turns out that it had already been arranged and I have never been anywhere so strongly redolent of mid-seventeenth century patrician Dutch culture:  the small number of well established families, closely intermarried and full of civic conscientiousness, made prosperous by the profits of the Dutch East India Company and surrounded by images of the streets, houses and churches of Amsterdam, as well as their family portraits.   Best of all is the astonishingly vivid portrait of Jan Six I by Rembrandt showing the man who had so often bailed him out, painted with a combination of casualness, intelligence, swift brushwork, human sympathy and vim.   We went out into the garden, which gave a feel for the private life of Dutch families, normally maintained so visibly on public display, but not in their gardens behind.   The Six’s only moved into their current house in 1915, but it still has the layering of the last eleven generations.

Lo and behold, the Gemeentemuseum, the great cradle of modernism, designed by H.P. Berlage in 1919, and not completed till 1935 after the Wall Street crash, has inaugurated a version of the Summer Exhibition, modelled on the Royal Academy’s, as a way of showing a wide range of contemporary art in a democratic way.   I find this intriguing as the art world in London is so often inclined to regard the Summer Exhibition as absurdly old-fashioned, reactionary, without acknowledging it’s democratic characteristics and the way it allows a broad range of artists to show their work independently of the gallery system.   I was also pleased to see Berlage’s system of diffused daylighting, so much admired by Caruso St. John, the quality of the tile work, not to mention a finely considered display of Mondriaan’s evolution to pure abstraction in 1914 and Victory Boogie-Woogie bought for the museum by the Dutch government in 1998 for $40 million.

Am in Rotterdam for the first time since I came in 1968 as the third player in a school performance of Hamlet.   The Kunsthal is an interesting model:  25 exhibitions a year;  only 23 staff;  fast turnover, including fashion and photography;  a building designed by Rem Koolhaas in an ad hoc style.   Currently showing an exhibition of Shoes involving crowdsourcing (but not crowdsourcing in the selection of the shoes) and a very busy exhibition of 100 objects representing the history of the second world war, packed with schoolchildren and including the marbles which belonged to Anne Frank.   The energy costs and maintenance costs are covered by a long-term contract with a local energy company ENECO (sorry, this is a slightly geeky comment).   Interestingly, they accept no sponsorship from fashion companies for their fashion exhibitions.