Our Grand Museum-Tour
September 2001

These pages are a kind of memory-game : What pictures do I remember from our visits to 19 museums in 2001? Eight years have passed since, and the number of paintings we saw was large – several thousands in fact.

It all started in January 2001 when the Boymans and van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam announced a special exhibition devoted to Hieronymus Bosch. With my 20-year passionate interest in Bosch I simply had to see it. I wrote to Marc, and he offered to drive us to Rotterdam and any other museum of our desire in Holland and Belgium. I had once spent a week in Amsterdam but never been to the history-rich towns of Belgium: Ghent, Brugge, Antwerp, or Brussels. I began to search for their museums, and many pictures of the present diary are based on that survey.

Several other invitations followed. Marc's parents invited us to their 40th anniversary, Christine and Rudolf insisted that we pass by their art-nouveau house in Hagen, Klaus and Lilo invited us to Hamburg, and we had never visited Dieter and Evelyn in Berlin. Finally Marc discovered that Dmitri Gergiev would conduct Shostakovich's opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in September in Rotterdam.

I attach a short diary of the journey.

All pictures are taken from the internet. I did not have a digital camera yet and had learned that photos with Kodachrome in the dim natural light of a museum never returned their promise. Besides the camera was too heavy to carry. My few personal photos are not included.

This tour has turned out to be a major milestone in our visual perception, and that is the reason why revived it after so many years.