I am very picky when it comes to museums that feature just art. I guess it’s all too… pompous for me, and rarely do I find beauty in what the museums find valuable. I especially experience this with modern art, though I make exceptions when I personally know the artworks: seeing them live does excite me. That’s why I totally get the long lines that form before the Mona Lisa for example.

As for good art museums in the Netherlands… there’s the big one, the Rijksmuseum. The van Gogh Museum perhaps… Apart from that though, I cannot really truly recommend one, based on my own experiences. Only these few months there is a very interesting exception: The Hermitage.

The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in Russia is world famous. This is its spinoff. A temporary one of a kind exhibition has caused the Russian one to lend off a part of its Dutch Masters collection, gathered together by among other Peter the Great and Catherina the Great, who were fascinated by their art. Together with the permanent collection that the Hermitage possesses, this ends up as a very good overview of what the Dutch art of the Golden age was like. This exhibition only lasts until May 2018, so you have to be fast.

Here’s what makes Dutch art of the 17th Century so special: they took inspiration from the Italian renaissance. However, when you look at most Italian masters, you see beauty, but the faces all don’t really seem that realistic. Take Michelangelo for example: he made beaufitul paintings, but don’t tell me that everybody of his time was as stacked as his paintings do suggest. Dutch masters aimed to be real. The best example of this is Rembrandt, which is why he got the most famous. I still don’t get how he did the lighting for his paintings, because this is incredible.

The top years are also defined not by paintings of Jesus or other holy or important people. Instead he painted the common folks. Rich merchants who wanted to have their pictures taken; regiments of soldiers together. This is what I find interesting. The stories behind the paintings, rather than a bunch of stuffy noblemen who all look the same.