On Late Rembrandt at the National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum

In the spring I spent a few days in Amsterdam and happily went along to the newly renovated Rijksmuseum. This was my first visit to the museum in many years. Although it had been closed for a few years for renovation, a part of its collection had still been available to the public at Schipol International Airport. This was an excellent example of Dutch innovative thinking - what other international airport offered for contemplation the works of masters like Vermeer and Hals to passengers in transit?

I was impressed by the renovation, especially the new entrance hall, which reminded me of a scaled down version of the entrance to the Louvre in Paris and even the British Museum in London.  But the main point of my visit was the exhibition "Late Rembrandt", which had already been shown in London's National Gallery in 2014-1015. Now, however, the artist's late works were all coming home. to the city in which he had lived and worked.

The Jewish Bride

Surprisingly, this was the first exhibition ever dedicated exclusively to Rembrandt's late works. I particularly enjoyed seeing two of my favourite paintings. "The Jewish Bride" and Bathsheba with King David's Letter.

The so called The Jewish Bride is properly known as Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca.  Vincent van Gogh told a friend that he would gladly give ten years of his life just to be able to sit in front of this painting for two weeks. Let's be grateful that he didn't, for a van Gogh dead ten years younger would have cheated the world out of a great number of  his masterpieces.  But we can all understand his sentiment. The moving embrace and the loving yet sad expressions on the faces make this one of the world's most intimate paintings.

The tender embrace

But seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, what struck me most was the complexity of the texture of the painter. It is no wonder that Rembrandt was considered a revolutionary.  The jewelry sparkles and seems to reflect the light on the room. The paint is caked onto the canvas. And I use the term caked deliberately -  I was tempted to lick it! Rembrandt layered the paint on thickly using his palette knife, or probably multiple knives.  Look at this sleeve for instance. You can almost reach out and tug it.

A close up of his sleeve - you feel like you could tug it

Close up of her dress, layered on with a knife

The other painting of Rembrandt that I love is Bathsheba with King David's Letter. It rivals The Jewish Bride for its tenderness. The force of this painting is extraordinary in the way that it makes the invisible visible.

It is the inner emotional turmoil of the mind that is the subject of the work - should Bathsheba agree to the king's demands outlined in his letter that she holds in her hand, or should she remain faithful to her husband. Recently X-radiography has revealed that originally Rembrandt had painted her with a shocked expression on her uplifted head. But in a stroke of genius he changed this. Instead, the picture is almost entirely motionless, she is profiled against a dark background, her white body illuminated by light. Our eyes travel upward, from the servant at her feet, to the letter in her hand, along her nude body and arrive at her face, exquisitely rendered, lost in contemplation. It is, I would venture, one of the most beautiful faces in western art.

One of the most beautiful faces in western art

Late Rembrandt brought together many exceptional works by one of the most exceptional artists. That said, not everyone was impressed. This young lady for instance. While she might share the beauty of Bathsheba's face, her expression does not reflect an inner moral dilemma, just plain irritation. She is clearly thinking, when is my dad going to be done and we can get out of here.

One Hundred Days by Lukas Barfuss

Lukas Barfüss, One Hundred Days (Granta Books, 2013)

I’m sure you’ll agree, translators are the nicest people in the world, (teachers excepted of course). Just think about it, some poor, asocial sucker, with the loneliest job in the world, has spent the past year or so locked up in a room writing a book.  Along comes the translator and, in return for a pittance, sits for the best part of half a year or so locked up in a room and miraculously turns the foreign words into something you can understand, thereby allowing you to break out of the narrow-minded parochialism that comes with being an English speaker and actually hear what other people (the majority) are saying in other languages. So three cheers for Tess Lewis (whoever she is), for translating the novel One Hundred Days by the young Swiss author Lukas Barfüss.

In this contemporary version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, steamy sex and genocidal murder make for a potent mix, told in deceptively simple, taut prose. The protagonist is a naïve chap by the name of David Hohl. He has always been moved to fight against injustice. Had he gone to Zurich International School he would have won the ZIS Cares Award. So he gets a job in economic development and his first post is in the sleepy African backwater of Rwanda. But, the surface is deceptive and Rwanda is about to explode into the 1994 well planned genocide of Tutsis. In the one hundred days of the title the Hutus slaughter nearly 800,000 people. Because he is obsessed with a beautiful, but racist Hutu woman, David Hohl refuses to be evacuated, and instead stays and witnesses the slaughter. No wonder his name is Hohl (which means hollow).

Barfüss reveals the hypocrisy that lies at the root of Swiss development work. His book is a meditation on how a strong sense of virtue can gently lead to passive participation in the most horrifying cruelty. Most of all, his book works as a metaphoric warning against being sucked into any organisation that comes to see efficiency as an end in itself - surely a lesson for us all. Peaceful, well organised Rwanda was sometimes called the Switzerland of Africa. Barfüss sees that you can reverse this, seeing Switzerland as the Rwanda of Europe. He reminds us that Switzerland is a well-oiled machine that runs smoothly, where order, routine, discipline and respect for institutions holds sway, but adds: “These characteristics are not impediments to mass murder, but necessary conditions. Evil loves nothing more than the proper implementation of a plan, and in that domain, you have to admit, we are world champions.”

This book has garnered Barfüss a number of literary prizes, as well as nominations for the biggest book prizes in Germany and Switzerland. He is, of course, almost unheard of in the insular, provincial English speaking world.

The creoleness of Betawi Culture

You can read my review of Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia by Jacqueline Knorr in The Newsletter of the International Institute of Asian Studies by clicking here.

Maria Dermout and "unremembering" lost time

It has been nine months since I last wrote in this blog, basically because I needed to focus my energy somewhere else - researching the cultural legacy of decolonization in the Netherlands.


This, I am happy to say, has resulted in an article of mine appearing in the Canadian Journal Of Netherlandic Studies. Nevermind that it is the 2013 edition of the journal - it only appeared last week.


My article provides an analysis of two Dutch novels. In the early 1950s  Only yesterday (Nog pas gisteren) and The ten thousand things (De tienduizend dingen), appeared from a new writer, Maria Dermoût. In this essay I argue that both of these works helped to shape a collective memory of the recent colonial past and that with the loss of place, the Indisch community was threatened by a potential loss of identity, but that literature was able to provide the memory of a sense of place, and collective memory could be retained. I argue that this memory took on a nostalgic form, helping to shape a collective identity based partially on a melancholy sense of common loss. But dwelling on nostalgic loss did nothing to help explain the loss of the colony, and thereby inadvertently contributed to a general unremembering, or refusal to remember, the painful final years of decolonization. A post-colonial analysis of her novels reveals that they were written from the viewpoint of colonial privilege and that, as such, they silenced alternative narratives and thereby further contributed to unremembering the painful process of decolonization. I conclude that Dermoût’s work helped to create a mnemonic community based on nostalgic remembering, but by trivialising or ignoring Indonesian nationalist aspirations, her work inadvertently served to unremember the reality of decolonization. I hope you'll go to this link and read my entire article, or download this version. I would love to hear back from you.

French Revolution Jokes

Just revising the French Revolution with my class this morning and we decided to make up some French Revolution jokes. Here is the best of the bunch. (Imagine what the worst are like!)

What did Robespierre’s mistress say to him on their first night together?

“Disrobe Pierre.”

Who was the heaviest revolutionary?

Dan-ton.

Why were the Jacobins so ambitious?

They wanted to get a head.

Which Declaration was a bitterist one to swallow?

The Pill-nitz Declaration!

What was the weather like during the French Revolution?

Storm and Terrorble Reign

When does March come after September?

During the Women’s March on Versailles.

What was the most popular game during the revolution?

Head-over-heels.

Which revolutionary was a real nuisance?

Tom Paine

Who was the most popular general among the working class?

General Maximum

During which oath did the participants make an awful racket?

The Tennis Court Oath

Which club formed the loudest group of revolutionaries?

The Giron-dins

Why was one revolutionary club never serious?

Because they were always Feuillants around.

Which writer was always depressed?

Marquis de Sade

Article in Spanish

Professor Anaclet Pons of the University of Valencia in Spain has translated my recent article on the history of decolonization in the Dutch East Indies, which first appeared at University of Exeter's Centre for Imperial and Global History. You can read the post in Spanish here.

Imperial Past Returns to Haunt the Netherlands

In July 2012 a Dutch national newspaper, de Volkskrant, published two photos on its front page showing Dutch soldiers brutally shooting dead unarmed victims in a mass grave. The images were shocking to a nation that prides itself as being upright and humanitarian.  Never mind that the photos were nearly 70 years old. Found in a rubbish tip, they were, in fact, the first ever photos to be published of Dutch soldiers killing Indonesians during a war of decolonization that is still euphemistically referred to as “Police Actions.”  

To read the rest of my article click here to visit the Centre for Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter.