Korenveld met kraaien, Wheatfield with Crows

One of my favorite paintings in the Rijks is Thomas de Keyser's Group Portrait of an Unindentified Body. Rembrandt's best paintings were his self-portraits, but it's impossible for me to take any one of them alone. They all fit into one idea, the idea of a man trying to understand himself, and in the process he gives us something more than a series of paintings. He gives us a record of his soul as he gradually accepts that his life will never be what he wanted it to be. I know how that feels, and I find his vulnerability all so beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

De Keyser was one of the painters Rembrandt admired. You see the same darkness, but de Keyser's brushstrokes are cleaner and this gives such a power of expression to these men's faces. The texture of their skin. The exactness of their expressions. Above all, their profound eyes. What Rembrandt gave is more valuable to me, but I find this paintings more beautiful than any single Rembrandt. Another painting that touches me is Verner van den Valckett's Portrait of a Man with Ring. He's a ringmaker, proud of his trade, finely dressed. I like the white collar that frames his face, the blackness around that, the grey concrete windowsill.
It's simple, but not so simple. This was the 17th century. The British Empire would have an area greater than the surface of the Moon and London would rule it all, but before that the Dutch were the greatest colonial power and Amsterdam was the financial center of the world. All these paintings of merchants and guild masters by the great Dutch artists are essentially a celebration of colonialism. You can't divorce colonialism from its horrors, and Dutch colonialism was particularly horrible. All of Amsterdam's buildings too, also so beautiful and yet also products of the same wealth generated by colonialism. These are all the things that ran through my head while I walked through Vondelpark. I happened across an outdoor concert and sat for a while. A guy was playing his cello like it was a banjo while another fella sang in Swahili.
It was an amazing day. After the park, I went to the van Gogh museum and standing in front of Wheatfield with Crows is probably my favorite thing I've done in Europe so far. But again I thought about colonialism and how van Gogh was all about vividness. That was his thing. He was always trying to get the most powerful colors. He even moved to Arles because he thought the colors there would be as vivid as the ones from his beloved Japanese prints. Matisse once said that a bucketful of red is redder than a thimbleful of red. That's why he slammed on curtains of color and later gave up his paintbrush for a pair of ultra-long scissors, cutting shapes out of swaths of colored paper. It reminds me of van Gogh, but all his colors and color inspiration was again come from afar and wouldn't have happened if the Dutch weren't colonialists.

About van Gogh's wheatfield: I don't find it sad at all. It was painting near the very end of his life, yes, but when I look at it I see such striking color. Vivid blue, yellow, black, those gold wheat edges and pale blue patches -- and those breaking v-lines that cut the composition. It's like an attack. But then look: the clay path shines and there's a touch of blue there too. It's a puddle. The storm has already passed. Light is breaking through the clouds.