Ring Canal Walkabout

Yesterday dawned cold and clear. In the green grass of the city parks, bulbs are pushing their way out of the winter-cold ground, yearning for the sunshine. Tulip season is almost upon us!

In the Grote Markt, vendors display bulbs of all types. Whether they are cut and ready for a vase or as bulbs to be planted in the ground, flowers are a big part of the culture here.

flowers, Haarlem Grote Markt

It still snows periodically but the ground is warming up and snow only lasts for a short time. Meanwhile the canals are mostly ice-free these days and there is definitely a spring time feel in the air.

And so in the hastening change of season, I took a walkabout. Using the ring canal as my guide, I circled the city in a march for Haarlem adventure.

It took about five hours, with a stop for lunch and a coffee in the middle at a cute little place called Crepe Affaire on Kruisstraat.

Nieuwe Gracht canal from the Kruisbrug, looking west

Despite the thaw, it seems worth mentioning that February in Noord-Holland has not always been ice-free.

Many artists of the 17th century painted images of Dutch daily life with tremendous accuracy. There is no reason for us to believe that the winter landscape paintings would be any less realistic than the summer depictions.

Take, for example, Klaes Molenaer's undated image of a Haarlem winter landscape from the 1660s. 

Klaes Molenaer,
A Winter Landscape With A Man Pushing A Sledge In The Foreground,
A View Of Haarlem With The Cathedral Of St. Bavo Beyond,
n.d., oil on canvas
13.38 x 17.99 inches

This, like many others of its time, depicts a frosted road and field on the outskirts of Haarlem. In the background, St Bavo Cathedral -- usually referred to as the Grotekerk -- looms on the horizon line.

As is typical of the genre, clouds and sky make up half the composition. The color range is small, featuring variations of gray, punctuated only by the farmer's brown clothing. 

woman at the Grote Markt,
Cathedral of St. Bavo,
Haarlem

The vantage point suggests the viewer is looking at the scene from above -- probably the dunes near Zandvoort -- and to the east. 

Although not nearly as masterful as Ruisdael's image of the bleaching fields, Molenaer presents a faithful rendition of winter as it probably appeared during his lifetime. Today I am thankful the day is more sunny than snowy.

My walkabout led to a neighborhood on the north side of town. 

Streets crowded with bicycles, a radiator shop and the detritus of the working class belied the importance of the street names. Here was Frans Halsplein, a tiny street complete with a girl on a bicycle texting as she pedaled past me. 

Around the corner can be found more streets named after other artists, this one on the corner of a main throughway.

Wandering further, I was finally rewarded with the ultimate goal of my search: Molenaerstraat. This street was named after Jan Miense Molenaer, the older brother to Nicolaes. 

Nicolaes, it seems, was the lesser in age, status and ability. He didn't even get a street named after him. 

Nonetheless, the family name is immortalized in the city.

Successful in finding the artists' quarter, I headed for home, stopping only once to pick up some cheese and thereby completing this segment of art, cheese and a walk.

Winter in Haarlem and the Case of Klaes Molenaer

A couple days ago we rode the train to Haarlem, a small city about eight miles from the North Sea. It's colder here than it was in Delft, and the wind chill factor makes the day temperature about -6°C, or 21°F.  A north wind blows in from Norway and Sweden, bringing along scattered snow flurries.

Welkom to winter in Haarlem. 

Klaes Molenaer, Winter Scene with Skaters, n.d.
Oil on panel, 23 1/2 in. x 32 in.
E. B. Crocker Collection, 1872.629

Arriving in this season seems appropriate, however, since one of the subject artists whose works appear in the Crocker Art Museum often painted winter landscapes scenes. 

Nicolaes Molenaer (c. 1630 - 1676) was a landscape artist associated with the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, an artist's association active in the region. 


His winter scene paintings often focused on the pleasures and challenges of daily life in Noord-Holland.

He, along with two of his brothers, participated in a thriving artistic and cultural milieu in Haarlem -- a city he lived in his entire life -- at the height of the Dutch Golden Age.

Although considered by Stechow to be a "minor artist," some of the techniques Molenaer employed in this painting are part of a much larger mid-century trend among Dutch painters, including an emphasis on figure groups, the use of local color and clearly defined structural elements (Stechow 109).

Here the viewer sees skaters on a frozen pond at the city's edge. One man has fallen down. Others, on the right, appear to be ice fishing. Dogs, a romantic couple and parents pushing their children in sleds draw the viewer's eye around the composition. This is every day life in Haarlem circa 1660.

Above, winter clouds struggle for dominance over the blue sky. These blues and grays balance out the more tonal browns of the buildings below. There is no red. Molenaer is not brave enough to abandon the brown tones completely but he does a decent job of straddling the center of the palette.

Compositionally, Winter Scene with Skaters, operates on a cross diagonal, meeting at the central windmill blades. The energy of the storm clouds in the upper right is balanced by the busy-ness of human activity in the lower left. The large patch of empty blue sky in the upper left is moderated in the lower right by the weight and color of the buildings.

signature, K. Molenaer
on A Winter Landscape with Skaters, n.d.

Molenaer often signed his paintings K. Molenaer, as is shown in the close-up above from another image, emphasizing the abbreviated Klaes for Nicolaes. 

Thus, akin to Molenaer, I am signing off in order to go find some of the pleasures and challenges of daily life in winter's Haarlem.