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i left van gogh on the stoptrein

The day wakes us up, banging little golden nails through our eyelids. It's too too bright to waste our last day in the damp old Reijksmuseum, so we dump our luggage and take to the canals instead, drifting from café to bridge to shop and back again. Ellé finds the shop with the most fairy dresses of all; I find one selling myriad glittering glass beads. We try to resist doing anything but fetch up in the houseboat museum anyway, pressing buttons to operate tiny models of houseboats and watching a very, er, Tate slideshow.

The afternoon melts in the sunshine and we sink back to the station and prise our gear out of the lockers, including our van gogh posters packed neatly in their bright blue toblerone packets, and struggle to the train. It's hot now, summer-hot despite the earliness of the year, and even the novelty of windmill-spotting from the top of a double-decker train is hardly keeping our eyes open. When we get to Schipol I get off the train but my poster doesn't, and though I run back down the luggage slope I know I'm too late and it's gone. I wave it bye and let it go, orbiting Amsterdam on the stoptrein.

It'll find a home.

the poster I lost


( 2 worms — Feed the birds )
4th Apr, 2002 03:03 (UTC)
That's a picture you don't see in the Van Gogh books.
4th Apr, 2002 05:27 (UTC)
peopel who write art books only care about their own theories
I got it because it was different from the rest. The museum has lots of his early stuff, back when he was thinking to himself, what do people like? What do I like? What methods can I use? How do I paint? This painting is actually based on a picture he saw on the front of the cover of a french magazine, not even a japanese print, just a bit of fussy french Mucha-esque Japanoiserie. And it's full of dirty jokes (the animals in the borders are all slang words for prostitutes) and silly, and fun -- things I'd never really known about Van Gogh before. You hear so much about his breakdown and suicide, but there's a lot of joy there, too. And bonkers things like this. Fortunately, I liked it so much I sent a postcard of it home to Damian! So I've not totally lost it.
( 2 worms — Feed the birds )