Hals at Nightfall

The “war against water,” the Dutch struggle to wrest their country from the sea, is strangely invisible now. Concerns about global warming are just that, global. The little local struggles — the rush to get the livestock to higher ground, the nervous pacing along the village dam — belong to dangers from olden days, like getting shipped off to suppress a tribal uprising in Sumatra, or contracting cholera from shit in the canal. Only the very old recall the last time things went wrong. The North Sea Flood of 1953 occasionally resurfaces in black-and-white photographs and television documentaries. Every Dutch person has seen these images, but they look as remote as the folk costumes that the people in them are wearing. Almost nobody has experienced the old ancestral terror: that water, looming, lapping, leaping, waiting to whisk you away. This is because the flood of 1953 was the last of its kind. In its wake, the government embarked on one of the most elaborate engineering projects in history, the Delta Works; but the challenges for which they were designed are not the challenges, barely envisioned, of global warming. To ask whether those enormous barriers can withstand the new age of weather is to wonder how long the Netherlands can survive. With every freak hurricane and unexpected drought, we find ourselves, like every generation past, dwelling on eschatology. And when we imagine the collapse of dune and dike, among the many dark things that we imagine are the cultural losses such a cataclysm would bring. If the western Netherlands — all those cities, with all those museums and libraries — were swept into the sea, which treasures would we miss the most? It is a question that people in other increasingly vulnerable cities should increasingly be asking themselves. The extraordinary artistic riches of the Netherlands notwithstanding, the answer to that chilling question, to this awful cultural triage, is surprisingly easy for me. It is to be found along a quiet street in Haarlem. There are many reasons for the art pilgrim to come to this city, halfway between Amsterdam and the ocean. Today virtually a suburb of Amsterdam, a few minutes from its central station, few cities have as distinguished a cultural tradition as Haarlem, a tradition honored in the museum that bears the name of its greatest painter. To see Frans Hals in his own place is to realize that not every artist travels well. Some can be seen anywhere: you can appreciate Titian better in Madrid, Paris, or Washington than in his hometown of Venice, where his works blend too seamlessly into the ambient splendor. Yet you will never understand the point of Carpaccio outside his own ghostly city, where his bizarre mythological tableaux glow with Egyptian mystery. The Dutch, for the most part, are transportable. Most of them painted for living-room walls, and those can be found anywhere: one reason that, since medieval times, their works have been exported by the tens of thousands. If Holland disappeared, the achievement of its painters would still be visible all over the world, and we would know their Golden Age as we know those of Greece and Rome — from noble fragments. Enough Rembrandts and Vermeers would survive, even if The Jewish Bride and The View of Delft were not among them. But though many of Hals’ greatest works are in foreign collections, you still have to come to Haarlem to see him. There, in eight gigantic paintings — placed end-to-end, they are twenty-three meters long — the Dutch Golden Age unfurls in portraits of members of Haarlem’s charitable and military institutions. They show eighty-four people in all, painted over half a century. In June 1902, to escape construction noise next door to his house in London, the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler fled across the North Sea. In The Hague, he met the German painter Georg Sauter, who was dismayed to see the state of Whistler’s health. A drive to the beach at Scheveningen sufficed to exhaust him; and when Whistler spoke of going to nearby Haarlem, Sauter thought he was too frail. The next day, he was amazed to find Whistler in Haarlem. They strolled past the

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