A Beautiful Day in Haarlem

 

Last weekend a friend (whom I haven't seen a long time) suggested let's go somewhere out of town and we ended up in Haarlem - it is a prettiest little gem of the city relatively close to Amsterdam and easy to reach even with a public transport (we went with a car). I have always loved Haarlem, its much smaller and quieter than Amsterdam + it has less tourists and less pressure from international party crowd, truly a beautiful little historical town with old architecture and some brilliant museums, in fact if I am correct, the very first museum in the country is here, a famous Teylers Museum which this time we did not visit.

It also happened that it was a weekend of "Open Monumentendag" which is basically similar to "Open Museum" concept, but it happens trough the day - so we went to Frans Hals Museum which I always loved, the 17th century building used to be an orphanage (and old people's home) so one can still see the dining room where children used to eat and there are some spectacular portraits of sour-faced old ladies who were administrators back in the day. No one was smiling on those old paintings, probably they thought this was a serious matter and smiling was perhaps seen as too frivolous, who knows. Tons of beautiful art, many by enigmatic Frans Hals himself, who painted his own face on a group portrait of the St. George Civic Guard - this is how we know what he looked like. I was very intrigued by paintings from two female Dutch artists: 17th century Judith Leyster (her signature is in the corner of the painting) and 1928 portrait of lady in a black hat by Charley Toorop that I really, really liked. 

But the biggest surprise was the museum in the same street - Verwey Museum that one could easily miss, if not for "Open Monumentendag" so we went inside and it was delightful. It is even older building and it has a beautiful collection about Haarlem itself (and its famous citizens), including local painter Kees Verwey - the museum is named after him, as he left his whole collection to Haarlem. There was also interesting exhibition about what artistic studio looks like (mainly eccentric and chaotic, as expected), art by his wife Jeanne Tilbusscher and a very nice part about Haarlem - for me this was such a nice surprise that I decided right there and than to visit again soon.

We also had a very nice lunch (just in time to avoid rain) in a beautiful local Indonesian place Café Samabe where we had excellent little "Rice table" for two: this is usually a selection of choice Indonesian dishes, generally served as a group meal but this one was for only two of us and it was perfect. Afterwards the rain had stopped and we could still wander a little about the town and enjoy some more coffee in the sun - it was a lovely day and I was enjoying it very much.