We spent our time in two of The Big Museums, and two others that are be lesser-known but very good.
The only place in the VanGogh museum where you can take a photo is beside a floor-to-ceiling enlargement of his self-portrait, where the crowds were even denser than in the rest of the museum. We had a great time there, at the cost of navigating all the other fans, but I didn't get any choice photos. The two-building complex has been completely renovated very recently, and it's very informative. In addition to VanGogh's many drawings and paintings, some of his letters are on display, with spoken translations into English. I assume that every visitor to Amsterdam comes here, as they should.
The museum also had a large exhibition of prints from Paris, including familiar Toulouse-Lautrecs and many many other artists' works. The staircase in the exhibition building was itself a beautiful collage of blowups, though I'm not sure that comes across well in my photo:
We left Vincent behind and went to the Rijksmuseum, at which we were apparently not the ten-millionth visitor:
This place is like the British Museum in London or the Prado in Madrid -- it's pointless to try to "do it" in one visit. So we carefully kept sight of each other in the large rooms full of people, and saw what we liked of the Rembrandts and other masters. Some of those paintings are HUGE and incredibly detailed; you could do a thorough study of silk clothing just from the paintings of wealthy burghers.
As usual, we looked for smaller collections of interesting works or artifacts, and as usual I was happy to see maps.
And here's a wind instrument with which you can play two tunes at once:
But the brain can absorb only so much, and after we were satiated, it was nice to sit outside. Fountains are always fun, and this woman won the lottery:
The next day we set forth again, this time to the maritime museum, nicely indicated thusly:
The building was once the navy arsenal, full of gunpowder. Now it's a spacious museum illustrating Dutch seafaring and the wealth that resulted from it. The exhibits are designed to include kids, without detracting from the adult experience. There was a whole section on Dutch whaling, from which I got two photos of baleen. On this one, kids go inside the whale through the baleen:
and in this one, you can see a slab of the real stuff:
We saw lots more inside, including navigation instruments and figureheads -- all very impressive. Then we went outside and boarded a replica of a Dutch East India ship:
This was as much fun as the Balclutha at the Hyde Street pier, with lots of artifacts that illustrate life on board -- though without Smell-O-Vision, I'm sure I underestimate the odors. Like, hammocks are fun, but for months on end?
Our last stop was the Dutch Resistance museum, another excellent display of information and many artifacts. Although the story ends well, with the liberation of the Netherlands after D-Day, it has very painful aspects that we didn't know about, like the Hunger Winter of 1944 (I think). Of course we knew that Dutch Jews were taken to concentration camps, but I didn't know that huge numbers of non-Jewish men were deported to German work camps. The museum made a big point of the horrible options facing everyone after Rotterdam was pretty much demolished, the government surrendered, and the country was occupied: adapt, collaborate, or resist. The stories of regular people, some heroic and some just surviving, were very moving. I especially liked the teenaged boy who, when the Germans confiscated all the radios, built tiny crystal sets that could receive one sort-of Free Dutch station; it reminded me of the boy in All the Light We Cannot See.
Finally, one of those serendipitous sights, snapped in some small park we walked by:
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