Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam

Liam, Kai and I ventured further together, going to Amsterdam this past Friday.  We took our bikes on the train, and negotiated the mile or so from Amsterdam Centraal to the Hermitage, where the Van Gogh museum is displaying its paintings while its real home is under renovations.  First of all, Amsterdam biking is JUST LIKE Leiden biking, only add more people, add tram tracks, oh yes, and add the trams themselves, add more cars that are more assertive... the same organized chaos, just a bit greater intensity.   We continue to get some looks because we are the only people in the entire city wearing helmets, and I don't mind one bit.   More on biking through Amsterdam in a later post.

We picked up Treasure Hunt games that the museum provides for kids and ate a bit of pb&j for energy before entering the exhibit.

This Treasure Hunt game absolutely transformed our experience in the museum from slogging past countless unknown pictures and words like, "I'm bored", into two hours of focused work by both of these guys.  It included a bit of drawing, identifying and imitating brushstrokes, finding particular paintings or small bits of a painting in a room, and identifying what sounds Van Gosh must have heard while he was painting a certain piece. 

 
Photos were not allowed in the exhibit, but I rationalized two quick ones on the basis that my subjects were not the art on the wall so much as the kids in the foreground.

We only got through about half of the exhibit, so we're going to go back to finish up.

some other paintings we saw at the exhibit:

Landscape at Twilight

Irises

The Yellow House

Wheatfield Under Clouded Sky

Tree Roots:  Believed to be Van Gogh's last painting before he died.  It is touted as the first modernist painting ever.