Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of the Hague

On a brisk but stunning autumn morning, we left Amsterdam on the early train, headed to the Hague, a short trip down the south coast of the Netherlands.

Amsterdam is the larger city and the capital of the Netherlands, but don’t let that detract from the importance of the Hague. A lot of important institutions have their home in the Hague: the Dutch parliament, the Supreme Court, most foreign embassies, and the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, two judicial bodies of the United Nations. It’s little wonder then that the relatively small city boasts such an impressive international reputation.

We started our day at the Mauritshuis, an art gallery with a particular focus on Dutch Golden Age works, including some of the big names we’ve had a chance to see in other galleries, like Rembrandt and Vermeer. This gallery was a bit unique, in that it was an intimate walk through a period house—the Dutch Classicist building dates back to the mid-1600s, when it was owned by the governor of Dutch Brazil, and the rooms still retain an ornamented, intimate feel.

We made sure to pay homage to the key works in the museum, especially the Hague’s Mona Lisa herself, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Vermeer’s famous painting from 1665 pre-dates Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal of the Girl in 2003, and is meant to be a tronie—a depiction of a facial expression that isn’t a portrait. Actually, the Girl herself was imaginary, and her over-the-shoulder gaze and illuminated face showcases the painter’s conception of an ideal.

Also, apparently an astrophysicist in 2014 wrote a legitimate scientific article, arguing that the sheen on that earring suggests the thing is made of tin, not a pearl. Because complete scientific accuracy in painting is one of the foundations of the artistic community, right?

We had a lunch in the nearby Binnenhof, the array of buildings where the Dutch government is concentrated in the city. We took our sandwich break, watched vigilantly by hungry seagulls, was on the front steps of the Ridderzaal, an imposing, Gothic-like structure at the edge of a cobbled plaza, that serves at the location for the speech from the throne and royal receptions. The Ridderzaal’s roots go right back to the thirteenth century, and it looks the part.

We made sure to stop at the Panorama Mesdag, a gallery of another Dutch artist, Henrik Willem Mesdag. I’m not going to pretend that we were at all familiar with this man’s contribution to Dutch art, and maybe that’s what made the actual exposure to his work so jaw-dropping.

Mesdag was a marine painter, and a small gallery of his work in the entrance hall recalls scenes of ships at sea. And gourds, which is besides the point, but I was in an autumn mood.

At the end of the small collection, you enter another hallway, this one blackened, giving your pupils a chance to dilate. Then, you climb a small staircase, and enter a veranda surrounded by a sandy circular platform, and upon the wall is a massive panorama beach scene.

In its actual dimensions, the circular painting is 14 m high and 120 m around. In terms of its actual appearance, however, when you factor in the dazzling lights coming from above that actually look like the sun, and the gentle wave-and-seagulls soundtrack playing in the background, your eyes really do play tricks on you—this really does look like you’re on a gazebo on a hill on the edge of a beach. The sheer scale of it absolutely blew us away, and unfortunately no picture I could take is capable of creating that same numbing impression.

These illusionary paintings were a bit of a fad in the late 1800s, and a few still survive around the world today, including in Switzerland and Poland. Maybe the best tidbit about the Mesdag panorama is that it depicts a real scene in the fishing village of Scheveningen, just outside of the city proper—a real scene that no longer exists, which is fitting because Mesdag explicitly wanted to preserve this vantage points of one of his favourite spots. Now, thousands of people every year get to feel that complete sensory immersion on a Dutch beach in 1881.

Back in the real world of the outside, we passed by Noordeinde Palace, carefully watched by a horse-backed statue of William of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the 1500s and forerunner of the Dutch monarchy.

There aren’t a whole lot of imposing buildings in the Hague (by and large, the city is a bit of an understatement, a humbling European hotspot that doesn’t gush over its own self-importance), but the Peace Palace is an exception. Let’s start small, with the World Peace Flame—small in stature, huge in significance.

That burning flame is actually collected from distinct flames brought from around the world, united into a single flame that burns indefinitely. The World Peace Flame is then surrounded by a small circular walkway adorned with stones from the 197 countries recognized by the United Nations—a single declaration of peace that is unprecedented, given that literally every nation on the globe contributed to a single monument.

Then, the Peace Palace itself, a huge building in the midst of a garden that has earned the reputation as the seat of international law. That’s a bold claim, but it houses (amongst other things), the International Court of Justice, the court of the United Nations. The parties that are represented here are states—countries disputing interpretations of treaties and international law. Additionally, the Peace Palace contains the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the Hague Academy of International Law. 

We ended our day in the Hague with a stroll through a nearby park and a coffee break at the Fotomuseum, where a special exhibition of Hellen van Meene’s work, “The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits,” focusing on adolescence, was a little more avant-garde and artistic than I was prepared for. There was nothing pretentious about the autumn leaved strewn throughout the city, though, making for a perfect end to the day as we completed our loop back to the station.

After a long day on the move, I wolfed down some supper and took the next metro into Amsterdam, for a public keynote as part of the Amsterdam Privacy Conference. It’s a bit of a moot point to say that, by embracing digital technologies in the way we have, we’re at a very unique juncture of time, where so much information on ourselves is out there, and we’re OK with that to a point, but we haven’t given up on innate desire to maintain our privacy. Nor should we, but that leads to a bunch of interesting policy questions—then you throw in security and surveillance into the midst, and it’s little wonder this is such a contemporary, hot button issue. Even the new James Bond movie is getting in on the action.

Bill Binney was the keynote, a former NSA intelligence agent who developed a program in the pre-9/11 days, called ThinThread, that would monitor the flow of information from person-to-person around the world, but only examine the information if it was suspect. That sounds vague, and the secretive nature of what cues the NSA looked for doesn’t exactly make it transparent, but the program was dismantled in August 2011. Binney left the NSA not long afterwards, and has since gone on to be a whistleblower for the privacy breaches the NSA is committing in America—essentially using the framework of ThinThread, minus the safeguards in place to keep people’s private information private.

That’s enough conspiratorial spy stuff for one night. If you’re actually interested in this stuff, Binney is the subject of “A Good American,” a documentary to be released in a few weeks.

Walking back to the station, I took a stroll along some of the canals on a beautiful autumn evening, and lo and behold, there was an unusual cluster of neon lights from Dam Square. Once I got a bit closer, it was as if Thomas Amusements had flown in to Amsterdam for the night, with a Ferris wheel, deep-fried treats, games, and a couple more rides crammed into the space in front of the Palace.

One of those rides happened to be “Around the World,” a spinning centrifugal ride that lifts little carts 60 m into the night sky. Forgetting for a second that I don’t exactly love heights, I lined up and jumped on board, getting a dizzying view of the city lights, stretching on off into the horizon. Excuse the blurring, we didn’t exactly stop for that picture perfect moment.

This was a different sort of panorama than Mesdag could have planned for, and a different sort of rush.

Reunited with the earth after spinning around the stratosphere, it was nice to get back in my own bed after a busy Sunday. The second period of classes starts tomorrow, but I won’t have too long to get readjusted to the new course load—Kayla and I are shipping off with Amber and Ted to Greece on Wednesday morning, seeking those enticing twenty degree temperatures in Athens and the island of Santorini. 

We’ll just have to try our best to have a good time, I suppose.

Cheers,

rb