Northwest Passage More

Cultivation

March 21

Yesterday was high culture day. I even looked for performances by the Seattle Symphony and the opera, but they don’t work during the week, and I’m going to be at the airport Saturday night.

A little before 10 I was outside the Seattle Art Museum by the Hammering Man. This is a monumental silhouette of a man who raises his arm and hammers four times a minute all day almost every day. I’m told he shuts down and takes a break at night and on Labor Day.

The Old Masters at the Seattle Art Museum were a few dozen pieces from Kenwood House, a museum in Britain that I had not visited, and a selection of the museum’s own Old World holdings. Kenwood House is closed for renovation and the traveling show is making its way around the United States.

The collection belonged to Lord Iveagh, a scion of the Guinness brewing family, who willed it to the United Kingdom. 

For me, as always, the highlights are the Dutch and Flemish masters.

The star of the exhibit is the self-portrait in oil of Rembrandt as an old man. He was broke at the time, but his gaze is steady. Maybe he was working over ideas of how to get more for this canvas. There was a room devoted to his etchings, which include several more self-portraits.

There was a Franz Hals portrait of a laughing, red-faced merchant seaman. As the note on the wall put it, you feel as if he was about to reach out and shake your hand. 

Van Dyck came to England to work, and there are a couple of his works in the collection. One is of Charles I’s cousin, James Stuart, Duke of Somewhere or Other, and another next to it is Henrietta of Lorraine, a countess, princess, or something, dressed in swirling folds of black and extraordinarily detailed white lace who looks out at everyone with a face that says we all smell bad.

A lady sat on the bench next to me and we started talking about the Rembrandt. He’s an old guy, but he’s not worried, and he was broke, too, when the painting was done. It reminded her, she said, of her father who in his last years had a lot wrong with him, but he never complained, but sat “like a mountain.”

Once, after my first visit to the Rijksmuseum, I told Larry about my fondness for Dutch painting. He agreed. “When you leave, it’s like you know those people,” he said.

That’s the thing that startles and engages me the most about these paintings.

There were several by Gainsborough and Reynolds. While they are beautiful and interesting, they are not as arresting as the Dutch and Flemish paintings.

I did like the naughty lady paintings, though. One Reynolds portrays Kitty Fisher, a very popular courtesan, as Cleopatra dropping a pearl into a glass of wine. Cleopatra, a story goes, did that—dissolving a large pearl from her earring and drinking the wine—during a dinner with Marc Antony to impress him. According to the commentary, it shows seduction, female power, and something else, but I can’t remember what because I didn’t really get past the seduction part.

There are two Reynolds portraits of a Mrs. Musters. Unhappily married and shortly after the death of one of her children, she is shown head and shoulders in a bonnet that covers her hair. It’s a professional portrait, detailed, and if it was the only thing in the room, worth spending time with.

On an adjoining wall, she is pictured as the goddess of youth and good times, Hebe. Reynolds painted her full length in a diaphanous gown, feeding a goose or a swan. There’s a wild sky and a heath suggested in the background. Wow, like she’s leaving a chain of broken hearts.

When the second painting was done, a couple of years after the first one, she had turned her life around and was sleeping with several aristocrats.

Of course, everybody’s favorite is Lady Hamilton. A brief bio sketch of her said she was a young unwed mother who performed in London and scandalized the respectable. She later married and became Lady Hamilton. At some time after that, she ran off with Lord Nelson. Maybe she had thing for one-eyed men who could command artillery. Don’t know. Just guessing.

After Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar, she fell on tough times. She linked up with a painter with a familiar name, George Romney, who was also her friend and together they started a rehabilitation campaign. The large picture of her in the collection shows her as a demure spinstress dressed in white and working at her wheel. Romney painted her about a hundred pictures nude and clothed, and she evidently became rehabilitated under the name Emma Hart. So apparently, even in blue-nose times, celebrity breeds respectability.

Painting galleries are great for the soul but hell on the feet. So I strolled a few blocks to Post Alley and the Tasting Room, for a taste of Washington State wine and a cheese plate. 

The cheeses were an Oregon blue and a goat cheese, also from Oregon, and an unidentified brie or camembert, all good strong flavors that hold up well with red wine.

The store sells one-ounce samples so I tried two merlots, one from a winery called Camaraderie Cellars and another from Willis Hall. Very different from each other. The Camaraderie was extremely fragrant and much stronger, maybe with more tannins, than I expect from a merlot. The Willis was good, but after the stronger merlot and with the cheese, it didn’t quite hold up.  It would be very good with something else.

So I had a full glass of Camaraderie. One man was at the bar when I got there, and after he left a lady plus two couples wandered in. Lile (not sure of the spelling), the lady behind the bar, was about to be flustered. She said as much. Six people at the bar is all she can handle. That’s why they have her work the store on afternoons in the middle of the week. Her husband and her sister-in-law are there more often.

A phone call came in; she said she had a “full bar” and to call back at three when the manager would be in. 

She showed me a magazine about Washington wineries. They were dotted all over the map—dozens certainly, more than a hundred maybe. Far more than I can sample. I read that the Tasting Room is a co-op supported by a half-dozen wineries.  

The Tasting Room is in a little alley near Pike Place Market. The highlight of the market this time was a street musician doing Doors covers on an accordion. Try to imagine “Come on, Baby, Light My Fire.” Now imagine an accordion. Maybe you had to be there.

I took the No. 10 bus to Capitol Hill to a restaurant called Coastal Kitchen because it had salmon on the menu and was near the Stumbling Monk.

I had a half pint of Apocalypse IPA, which had the IPA hoppiness but also a slightly sour edge, reminiscent of the Belgian sour ales I had at the Pine Box.

I had the salmon with an OK pinot noir and followed that with a chocolate torte and a glass of cabernet sauvignon.

The Stumbling Monk is dark and divy. I drank a St. Bernardus Abbot 12, a strong spicy ale from Belgium, and a Czech pale ale called Primator. It was actually pretty dark. It was malty sweet but not too much.

I took a cab back to the hotel and checked out the bar in the cellar. There were two customers there, both of whom I had met on Monday night. I started talking to a lawyer named Byron (I got his name confused with the computer programmer) and a lady who I believe is Claire. We mentioned my trip to Bainbridge Island and the internment of the Japanese in 1941.

Claire said she is fourth-generation in this area, and her family lived on the island. Even though the displacement of the Japanese was a land grab, she said, the locals wouldn’t have it. They actually preserved the property and kept it from being sold off. After the war, when the concentration camps were broken up and displaced people returned, the islanders restored the property to them. I had never heard that before. I hope it’s true.

That’s about all I recall from the day. Be well, all.

March 21

Enjoyed the perspective on art. And, in good news on the Dutch art front, after ten years of renovation, the Rijksmuseum finally reopens next month.

You only saw a couple of halls that featured a "highlights" exhibition.

Another tip: Washington State syrah. You explained the other day about how the Cascade Mountains create a weather barrier: this creates excellent conditions for syrah. Keep your eyes peeled for some. The merlots are fine; pinot noirs are better from Oregon—especially Willamette Valley. But for Washington state, the experts say syrah is where it's at.

And I'm enjoying the beer write-ups. What makes the American craft beer industry so interesting is how many styles are available—from English to Belgium to Bohemian—and I agree, you have to love the IPAs, but I also think you undervalue the charms of pilsner. These can be quite elegant and hoppy. Can't wait for my first Brand Urtyp when I get back to Amsterdam.

Larry