Travel Sketchbook #2050, Holland [January 1973] pencil and ink

[RB journal entry]
Jan 12.
Again to Antwerp with a mis-adventure on the train. We chug along (with me feeling especially confident) and suddenly all lights go off. (didn’t I notice I was the only passenger) + our train stops dead in some forgotten hole. A kind engine man helps me down + walks me to a stop called fatefully Buda where I’m to wait for a local to Mechealean. Many trains go by before one stops. After that all is well. A new route to Beaux Arts. A lizzard-like town, a frog of an Opera house, a turtle of a station, wild inconsequent public buildings bird-dirtied + massively black. Holes dug everywhere, scaffolding flying, cranes flying in the improbable atmosphere - not a church spire is without a caterpillar-work of scaffolding; a subway is being dug in the bowels of the city - to compete with Brussels? Sky is violet-colored, the form predominately grey. Still I am full of happiness, alertness, free will. Wastlands on the periphery of all these cities. Smoke stacks as big around as city blocks put out a strange white lustrous cloud; tall black ones make black smoke.
Rubens dazzles further. A Milton of the language of paint but less message more sensuousness. A last great religious painter, always in the soft grey flesh shadows carmine, indian red. No edges. Hard to copy. Jordaens whose edges are more Caravaggesque easier. (Nothing is easy.) Jordaen has vitality with his nudes. Other grays + subject matter pictures appeal less. But the nudes are robust, remind me of Courbet, the same rich mindless talent. Rubens is in another ether. You cannot predict his movements.
I wandered into the old square behind the Cathedral which obtrudes + bulges through those tiny back streets like a monster toad from outer space. The Borromeo church is a horror + more shat-on with bird dung (the scent of which pervades the interior + that, mixed with tallow, is insufferable. I raced out.

It’s about 5. I’ve eaten heavenly waffles with whipped cream and a bag of almonds. I sit in my comfortable room noting the red sun go down in a sky trying in patches to become blue. A precise half moon in the sky which is now deep ultramarine.
Understand Rubens better. After all this is my first encounter with that genius. Try to find him in his fellow Flemings.

Jan 13.
To Bruges again on the first clear day. Early on snow + white sky but sun came forth (first a white disc) and though bitter cold the day has been virtually clear.

Rackstraw has gone to the south of Belgium to draw around Tournai. We’ll meet for the trip home.

Market day in Bruges. Gay stalls in the town square. I drew a bit shivering; in and out of coffee places to warm up between.
A beggar child sniveling + weeping crying mercy, mercy. Later I saw the same child led by a mother dressed in rags, a beggar by profession. I noticed many bandaged hands, some dwarfs, cripples, children with croupy coughs. All the carillon bells tinkling gay tunes in hub-bub.

Back to the little old masters. The Van der Paele looked better today - no artificial light, hence truer. The Van der Gaes in the next room very Renaissance seeming by comparison. I could view them together and the promises they make are very different, each interesting. From Van Eyck the tradition of reality-in-light i.e. Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer - Dutch interior painting. Out of Huge aritifice invention, arabesque, conscious artificial configurations as in Rubens. Van der Paele holds spectacles very like ours today. You know from David, Van Eyck exactly what kind of shoes were worn, the very quality of the leather, wool, silk, fur. This kind of topography or sociology is very moving (perhaps I should make some kind of concession to it myself?!)
(I won’t though.)

Tomorrow I’ll draw in the morning going to the park + perhaps the canal. In the afternoon I’ll venture into Beaux Arts pick up loose threads.