04/15/2022: Museum, Windmills and Cheese

Our excursion this morning was to visit the national museum of the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum, home to the largest collection of Old Dutch Masters paintings as well as other historical items showcasing the history of the Netherlands. The current home of the museum is in a fantastic Gothic building that I would have loved to just walk around the exterior because it had loads of interesting art right on the building.

I didn’t get a good photo; the one above was through the bus window on approach. This building was built in the late 1800’s and is located in an area named Museum Square that houses 3 other fantastic museums including the Van Gogh Museum. The area was not unlike our Smithsonian Institution.

The museum’s claim to fame is its collection of Rembrandts, Vermeers, and other famous Dutch Masters. The gallery where these paintings are located was in a fabulous grand hall containing several alcoves.

Here are some other paintings and items that we liked, including Van Gogh’s famous “The Potato Eaters,” this version being just a small sketch. The painting was very prominent in the Van Gogh Immersive show we went to last November.

At the end of the huge Old Masters gallery was a wonderful collection of enormous stained glass windows depicting various vocations, arts, science, literature, etc.

There were also several very large murals depicting historical events.

My favorite section of the museum was the library.

We only had a couple of hours to see as much as we could, because then it was on to windmills. To get you in the mood for windmills, here is a beautiful painting.

We headed out to the countryside by bus to the Schermer Lake area. It was a very interesting ride because our guide spoke at great length about the importance of windmills in the development of the Netherlands. Fully 26% of the country is below sea level and as the country developed in the 1600s land reclamation was crucial. The area was full of shallow lakes and so the Dutch needed to develop a way to remove water from the shallow lakes and pump it away to dry out the land for agriculture and residential development. What they did was to dig (by hand!) very large ring canals around the lake. With the dirt removed from the trenches they built dikes between the ring canal and the lake. On the dikes they built windmills containing the equipment necessary to pump the water from the lake to the ring canal. At one point there were over 10,000 windmills across the Netherlands. Other trenches and drainage ditches connected the ring canal to routes where the lake water eventually emptied into the sea. At first, the windmills used scoops, kind of like waterwheel mechanisms. But then the Archimedes screw was discovered to be 6 times faster and so all windmills used that mechanism. Once the lake was drained, the flat lake bottom is called the polder. As we traveled along, much of the road was built on top of the dike and you could clearly see that many of the farms were 8-14 feet below the dike, meaning below sea level, in the polder. Truly fascinating information. There are really no working windmills any longer. Water is pumped by electric pumps that are computerized. There still is a great need to keep the polders pumped because water so easily can fill up the polders from rain and storms coming in from the North Sea.

We visited a set of 3 windmills that were used in the 1600s to drain Schermer Lake. It took 2 years to drain the lake using 52 windmills.

The miller and his family lived right in the windmill. The internal workings of the windmill were quite intricate in terms of setting the sails, moving the angles of the blades to catch the best wind, and ensuring that the internal mechanism worked smoothly.

We then set off for Edam, where the cheese of that name is famous. Driving along we did see tulip and hyacinth farms. It was interesting to learn that the fields of flowers that we saw are not for flowers. In fact, very shortly after blooming, the flowers are cut off so that the bulbs do not spend too much energy flowering. It’s the bulbs that are harvested and so these are bulb farms.

Edam is an adorable small village community. We walked around the lovely village streets and ended up at a cheese weighing shop where we samples many kinds of Edam cheese.

It was a full day of learning about the Netherlands, its history, art, land reclamation, cheese-making, and people. Thus far, I have to say that I’m very impressed with the Netherlands, and Amsterdam. It’s a really interesting city and country. It is quite beautiful. We’re having a great time thus far, even if we are still pretty jet-lagged and tired. Neither of us has acclimated to the 6-hour time difference, but I’m sure we’ll eventually catch up on sleep. We’re just excited to be here.