A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

On the Trail of Frans Hals

The dashing young man in our apartment is giving Ann and me a knowing look. We’re sitting at the dining table, sipping our coffee and poring over a map of central Amsterdam. The windows are open. The cobbled courtyard three storeys below us invites with its benches and wicker chairs, mossy statuary, an elaborate stone Cupid fountain, all shaded by jungle-lush greenery (there’s even a palm tree) and the cast shadows of tall, skinny buildings whose erection dates from centuries ago. The humid air smells good, smells real, not at all like “fresh scent” laundry detergent or a dangling rear-view mirror car deodorizer. The young man on the wall seems to say to us, “Oh, you two.” Or he could be apologizing for his militia companion, his foil, the straight man just to his right: “He’s all right once you get to know him.”

I realize these dandies are an enlarged detail from a portrait. I can surmise the original oil painting was photographed and digitized before a portion was ink-jetted on to a substrate intended to suggest an artist’s canvas. The reproduction is generations beyond the original medium. But these guys hanging on our short-term rental wall are alive. Still, somehow. Who painted this? 

Our apartment is located in Amsterdam’s Southern Canal Belt. Our street or straat is Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal). The building’s black front door is three stone steps below the narrow, cobbled sidewalk. The stairs up to our unit are single-file only, wide enough for a man and his suitcase. The steps themselves accommodate half your foot, so balls up and the arch of your foot monkey gripping the risers’ edges going down. Across the one-way street, cobbled, back lane width, is a stately row of elm trees and then, if you’re not careful, a drop into a moored boat or green water as the railing is tripwire height. Our building and/or the extraordinarily efficient company that owns and manages it is called Dutch Masters. Ann and I had booked two weeks in the Frans Hals suite.

My knowledge of fine art is spotty. Throughout my life I’ve made something of an effort to learn more about the artists or movements that have captivated my attention. Still there are just two non-fiction works that have resonated with me, both about modern art. Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic, wrote Culture of Complaint which posited that the merit of any work has been sublimated by, is secondary to, whatever hip or fashionable message of the day it is attempting to convey. This criticism is easily applied to all of the arts. The other is Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word which gleefully skinned the pretension surrounding the industry with lots of exclamation points!! As for the Dutch Masters …

A print of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” hung on the dining room wall of the house I grew up in. As a boy I valued my set of Buffalo felt markers which came in a tin adorned with Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” – a set of 24. I’m familiar with Vermeer, not for his fetching milkmaids and such, but because the letters in his surname are a boon to crossword constructors although he’ll never rate with Brian Eno and Yoko Ono.

Like his slightly younger contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer, Hals (1582-1666) painted his portraits during the Dutch Golden Age. Cancel culture has since rendered the Dutch Golden Age problematic because imperialism, colonial expansion and exploitation, not to mention the slave trade, are evil – fair enough. Hals was something of a democrat, a standout, amid this era. His subjects were people beyond the fringe of proper society: actors, musicians, local drunks and eccentrics, militiamen, street urchins with mugs of beer. A pose he favoured was his subject seated sideways on a chair, a crooked arm thrown casually over the back, as if the viewer had tapped the fellow on the shoulder. We’ve all seen those impossibly stiff portraits from the early days of photography, poses held, maintained for impossibly long exposures. Hals was somehow able to paint candid shots with a Kodak Instamatic 124. Real life in real time. That’s the only modern analogy I can come up with.

The Rijksmuseum, provided Ann and I set off in the proper direction upon leaving our apartment, was a short, scenic walk away. Ann had bought tickets for the Hals exhibition there just the day before. Ann and I are interested but reluctant tourists. We don’t like scheduled commitments on holiday. Travel is leisure, we dislike working at it. Timed museum entries are annoying. We understand that people, especially hordes of tourists, require herding, but not us. The nearby Van Gogh Museum on Museumplein, well, we should’ve booked that last April or May. Same with the Anne Frank Haus.

Waiting for Hals, we killed time on a park bench outside the Rijksmuseum. We faced a traffic island, a smallish one populated with purple globes of allium. It was a very busy circle of controlled yet wanton chaos. There were buses and trams, cars and trucks and those peculiar three-wheeled Mr Bean vehicles. There were scooters, motorcycles, Mopeds and bicycles with baskets or barrows, some of them with too many wheels. Needing to cross this swirling river of metal were hundreds of tourists, not knowing where to look or step, walk or wait. God help me, I silently prayed for a pile up, carnage the likes of which I’ve never seen. Ann was expecting much the same but not hoping for it like I was. This was the second time on our trip when I realized that if God exists, I’m ticketed for Hell come Judgment Day.

The Anne Frank Haus is on Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal), across the calm water from the Tulip Museum, in a neighbourhood called Jordaan and around the corner from Westermarkt, a public square in the shadow yet another church. The queue to go inside is well regulated, the immediate area is kept clear. Casual passers-by without advance, timed tickets can at least gaze upon a building housing a beautiful and ugly history. It looked exactly the same as the one Ann and I were staying in, but, you know, the big, important stuff, whatever it may be, is usually surprisingly modest. My reflex was to touch my heart because industrialized mass murder is an abstract, the hiding place of an individual victim is not. Now I must make a confession. I had another thought. There’s that darkly comic scene in Mordecai Richler’s novel Solomon Gursky Was Here where the protagonist attends a wretchedly produced and performed play about Anne Frank. Desperate for its denouement, he tips off the stage Nazis: “She’s in the attic!”

The atmosphere inside the Rijksmuseum was close, almost stifling. Humid air, too many bodies, limited ventilation. It doesn’t take long for a modest quest of enlightenment to become something of an ordeal. We were caught up in a well-behaved mob, fully comprehending we were part of the problem. Touring the Hals exhibition, I was aware of sad irony: visitors, just steps away from masterpieces more than four hundred-years-old, tended to view the works through the lenses of their cell phones. Ann had a different vision. She led me over to one of Hals’s portraits. She said, “That’s Keith (Richards)!” And by God, there he was, sixties Carnaby Street dress, contemporary Keith with receding, thinning hair, a Disney franchise pirate goatee, that seen-it-all glint in his eye that you can almost hear like a smoker’s chuckling wheeze.

A desire to learn or piqued curiosity self-perpetuates. Bullet point facts acquire colour and context. Ephemera are reaped. There were a couple of instances on our trip when I was almost convinced Ann and I were somehow, inadvertently, searching for Frans Hals. One morning over coffee Ann suggested we were on some kind of accidental pilgrimage. The coincidences rang as fated, obvious. Our port of entry in Netherlands, and, indeed, the entire European Union was Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Visa stamps in our passports, we’d carte blanche to roam the continent. Ride the rails; transients with Eurail passes. Travel inside the EU is seamless.

The first train trip we took from Amsterdam Centraal was a short one. We arrived in Haarlem, closer to the North Sea, well inside of an hour. Haarlem, we learned, was where Hals spent most of his life, did all of his work. Grote Markt, the river (Spaarne) city’s central plaza, wasn’t far from the station. The public gathering place is, of course, dominated by a titanic church, Grote Kerk. The surrounding buildings don’t quite measure up, but they all reach for the sky in their own astonishing way. A tourist must always pause to look up. There are cobblestones, there are canals. Bikes to beware of. It is postcard Amsterdam scaled down.

Haarlem was designated a city around 1245. The trouble with medieval towns is that there are no straight streets. Ann’s and my internal compasses are spinning tops; I still need a fraction of a moment to differentiate left from right. When we wander in foreign places I try to orientate our location to a landmark. But sometimes there’s no bell tower or steeple in the sky to be seen, blind alleys with high walls. I point in a circle to indicate the direction we want. There are navigational tools at hand, but Ann and I know cell phone Siri is just like anyone, everybody else, doesn’t know what she’s talking about half the time. “Which way’s the train station?” “Uh.” “We came from that direction.” “No, I’m pretty sure it was that one.”

We became acquainted with the builder, a genuine craftsman, original materials and modern tools, who was renovating the building next to ours in Amsterdam. We could tell he loved his work. The three of us would chat by the canal most mornings when he was starting his day and we were smoking the day’s first cigarettes; Ann and I even got to know his painting crew. One morning I facetiously complained to him how confusing Amsterdam is and how confusing Haarlem was, off kilter places. He retorted that the North American cities he’d visited, laid out on grid systems with numbered streets and avenues had mystified to him. I said, “It’s good to know it works both ways.”

Our longest train trip was to Antwerp which we now knew to be the birthplace of Frans Hals. There was no stopping at the Belgian border, no inspections, no checks. Our friend Yves, whom we last saw in London in 2019 (a pub on the Tottenham Court Road) and the reason for our journey, lives about an hour’s drive outside the international illicit drug trade’s preferred European port and also the Continent’s second largest after Rotterdam. We’d arranged to spend the afternoon together before Ann and I travelled on to Bruges to spend the night and the next day. Yves met us at Antwerp’s airy and spectacular Beaux-Arts Central Station, the grandest utilitarian public building I’ve ever seen or set foot in my entire life. I promised Yves I wouldn’t gawk and pause to take pictures everywhere we went.

Immediately outside the station we took a café table in the middle of a broad, cobbled boulevard. I ordered a litre of De Konnig, the legendary local amber brew on Yves’s recommendation (God bless Antwerp, amid the typical infrastructure buried beneath a city, a beer pipeline runs from the brewery to its bottling facility some three kilometres distant). Ann had Coca-Cola from a glass bottle and Yves had a coffee as it was still before noon. He pulled a package of Marlboro Reds from his puffy jacket, a “giga” pack of 51 for the insanely low price of 18 euros; it was about the size of an assault rifle ammunition clip. I knew this because Ann and I had been taken aback by the very visible blue uniformed security patrols at Schiphol who positively bristle with black automatic weapons.

I told Yves I was anxious to see the Diamond District before doing other touristy stuff. He shrugged and said, “It’s just around the corner. We’ll pass it on the way to the carpark. There’s nothing to see. All the business is conducted behind closed doors.” Fortunately, I didn’t reveal my motivation was Diamonds Are Forever because I’d forgotten that the film’s European location was actually Amsterdam. It was possible Ann and I had already unknowingly crossed the “Skinny Bridge” not quite lost, but completely turned around (We had indeed; we jet-lagged dozed through the DVD once we were home). Antwerp’s Diamond District is a curvy row of shabby storefronts obscured by corrugated metal grilles. Some of the window displays were appealing if you’re into that stuff: smash and grab.

The postcard place isn’t far, but Yves has to drive as if we’re in a Chuck Berry song, turn and double back. Antwerp’s core streets have been jury-rigged for modern times. We arrive at another Grote Markt, three or four times the size of Haarlem’s; if this is Wednesday, it must be Belgium. City Hall is what I picture when I infrequently imagine the legislature of an EU national government. The imposing row of guildhouses to its right remind me that the lone economics class I took in university didn’t cover sixteenth century trade and commerce although, for some obscure reason, I’m aware of the seventeenth century tulip bulb market bubble bursting in 1637 and I’m pretty sure that neither Netherlands nor Belgium existed as I recognize them on my desk globe today back then. Ann’s and my ability to travel from time to time is a humbling gift because beyond the seen sights we’re constantly reminded of how little we know about these times and the past. Other people. And they’re not always Hell.

After the three of us, post-walkabout - having paused before Muze, a legendary jazz club, had sat in a café overlooking Antwerp’s Grote Market for an hour or more, enjoying the company, the food and the beverages, Yves drove us back to Central Station. Took a while, he got lost; some of the signs and storefronts seemed overly familiar on the second pass. My verbal filter was on, turned up to 11 and I was careful not to let him see me grinning like a maniac. But Frans Hals would’ve seen me framed in the passenger window. Anyway, Ann and I were in no rush.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.