Guus Bosman

We went to the Gallery of Art yesterday. We had prepared to take the Metro, like Adrian wanted, but it started raining so we took the car instead. I dropped everyone off, and parked 15 minutes away.

It is such a lovely place. We all had a good time. Leo liked the boats, Adrian liked Rembrandt's self-portrait and Nora liked the French impressionists colors.

We looked at several Greek and Roman statues, and the boys had various observations to make.

Here is Leo looking at a model of a Dutch "jacht" -- in the back you can see "View of Hoorn".

The new Google Arts & Culture app has a feature to compare a selfie with works of art.

For Adrian it found a good match with this painting. It's in the Phillips Collection in D.C. so we can check it out one day.

Yesterday we went to the Vermeer exhibition at the Gallery of Art. There was a 30 minute line for the exhibition. It was probably busy due to the holiday weekend. The boys were getting restless, bored and hungry so I left the line with them, and we had lunch together. It was very cosy with them in the restaurant; we had the sandwiches we brought from home and talked. After lunch we went back upstairs the room with old Dutch art, which was so beautiful. The boys even appreciated it.

Sasha and Nora saw the main exhibition which had works by Vermeer and his contemporaries. After that we met up in the restaurant again, which the boys liked because there would be more food...

A terrific morning together. When we were in the car going home Adrian asked if we were going to have "brood kaas" at home. But no, two lunches was enough.

We went to the National Gallery of Art this afternoon. It was the second visit for Nora and we went to see the modern art section this time. To be honest, I am not a big fan of modern art but Nora liked it a lot. She especially enjoyed watching the mobiles and the large brightly colored paintings.

Afterwards we went back to the West wing of the museum with classical paintings. I always enjoy watching the Dutch masters. We also saw a David-Apollo statue that was on loan from a museum in Florence.

It was a rainy Sunday today and we decided to visit the National Gallery of Art. This was Nora's first visit to a museum and she enjoyed it.

We watched several paintings together and she seemed to like them, especially the Van Gogh ones.

On the picture we are looking at Salomon Van Ruysdael's Rivierlandschap met veerpont. The painting was part of the Goudstikker collection and acquired by the National Gallery in 2008. Until 2005 it was on display in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. A beautiful painting.

On the way home Nora fell asleep in the car.

In the fall of 2004 Sasha, Steven and I went to the Toneelschuur in Haarlem and saw the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring.

A few days later, while I was waiting for my visa to be processed, we saw the painting in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. It's a gorgeous little painting, and through the movie it became one of Vermeer's best-known works.

Yesterday the news came out that Girl with the Pearl Earring will be shown in three museums in the United States next year, while the Mauritshuis is being renovated. Very exciting news.

Yesterday we made a roadtrip to the capitol of Connecticut, Hartford. We visited the Wadsforth Atheneum to see an exhibition on 'reunited paintings'.

The weather was great and it was fun to drive through New York state and Connecticut. We had lunch in Mount Kisco, a friendly town and on our way back we had dinner there as well.

The exibition was quite nice: 10 pairs of paintings that were painted together, but over the years were sold separately to different collectors and museums and were now reunited.

In the regular collection of the museum there were a number of Dutch paintings including a work by Jacob Ruisdael, "View on Bloemendaal".

Monday morning Jaap, Mieke and I visited Amsterdam. We left Middenmeer at 10.00 am and in the morning we visited The Complete Rembrandt, a very original exhibition consisting of reproductions of all known paintings by Rembrandt.

So, no original paintings in this event in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, only life size digital copies made from the archives of the Rembrandt Foundation, an organization that researches works by Rembrandt to assess authenticity for museums.

It was extremely interesting to see all these reproductions next to each other. For example, there was a chronological list of 7 self portraits of Rembrandt, from early age until his last known self portrait. It would be absolutely impossible to get these works, which are in collections all over the world, together for an exhibition. This is the great added value of this exhibition: to see these works together and next to each other.

Two reproductions of works that were stolen from a museum in Boston in 1990 were also on display. The Foundation had high resolution photographs made before the theft.

I just discovered through a review in the WSJ that the National Gallery has again a great exhibition of a Dutch 17th century artist, this time about Judith Leyster.

I don't know Judith Leyster's work, but she worked with Frans Hals and was one of the two only women accepted to the Guild of St. Luke in 17th century Haarlem.

The exhibition will run through November 29 and Sasha and will definitely go check it out, probably in September. According to the WSJ: "She deserves attention".

I'm also very excited about "The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size", an show with life-size reprints of all known works by Rembrandt. It's on display in Amsterdam, which I'll visit in about two weeks.

This weekend we made a wonderful trip to Washington DC. On Saturday we arrived in time for lunch at The Boulevard Woodgrill in Arlington, the area where we lived for two years. Lunch there was great, just as we remembered it, and it was a lot of fun to be back in the Courthouse area.

We spent time in Georgetown and in the evening we went out around Dupont Circle, with an excellent late night dinner at Pizza Paradiso. A very small, very friendly place with very good pizza.

Sunday morning we visited "Pride Of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age" in the National Gallery of Art. This exhibition is a corporation between The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in the Netherlands and the National Gallery, and combines works from those museums with many other paintings from all over the world. I first read about it in December when it was showing in the Netherlands.

We spent a long time in the gallery; it was truly wonderful. A highlight of the exhibition for us was "View of Hoorn", by the relatively obscure painter Abraham de Verwer. Together with the two Albert Cuyp paintings this work was a beautiful showcase of 'Dutch light'.