AMSTERDAM, and the places easily reached from Amsterdam, probably offer the best holiday value to anyone who wants to take a direct flight from Dublin to somewhere seriously foreign. The Netherlands is an all weather, all year, very easily managed destination. And you can get three nights in Amsterdam at a weekend, plus your flight, for about the price of the flight alone to other continental cities.
It is rewarding to go there at any time, but since the first day of this month, and until the second of June, the capital - The Hague - is one of the most special places on earth. Because the great Vermeer exhibition has moved to the Mauritshuis there, after three months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. By joining forces, the two galleries were able to secure a remarkable number of loans and to organise a spectacular exhibition.
Twenty two of Vermeer's known total of 35 paintings have been collected - more than have ever been seen together before, or will be seen again, at least in our lifetime. Entrance tickets have long been sold out. But so great is the attraction of this exhibition that some last minute re arrangements have been made. The gallery is extending its opening hours on Thursday and Friday nights, on some weeks till 9 p.m. and on others till midnight. And there are a few places on offer first thing every morning, when the gallery opens at 9 a.m. If you queue from very early you might get in.
It is worth queueing for a very long time to see these stunning paintings. I sent away for a ticket last year, when booking opened. I got to the Mauritshuis at the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the exhibition. Things were chaotic the young people running the cloakroom were overwhelmed and the temporary marquees and tented walkways for the crowds weren't quite ready, and inside the four small rooms which contain the paintings, the guards had to keep warning people who went too near the walls and set the alarms off. And there were television crews everywhere. But still, nothing could even slightly affect the wonder and the feeling of privilege at being able to stand close to these paintings for as long as one chose. They float free of the hype surrounding them. They belong to a different order of events to the everyday. They are lordly things. Some of them seem to charge the air in front of them, so absolutely great are they.
Not very much is known about the man called Vermeer, though he was highly thought of in Holland in the 1660s and not just in artistic circles his widow went to heroic lengths to try to stop one of his greatest paintings, which incorporates a version of a self portrait, from being sold to discharge some of his enormous debts. She was a Catholic, and he probably converted to marry her the earliest pictures in the present exhibition, in the first room, are copies of Italian religious paintings.
From the first steps you can see how he is interested in certain painterly effects - this is the glory of an exhibition in chronological order. But nothing prepares one for the change in subject matter and the advance in technique evident in the second room. The Milkmaid is there, and The Little Street and - radiantly cleaned - the masterpiece, View of Delft. The catalogue of the exhibition, a compendium of research and analysis, reveals just how much Vermeer departed from the literal facts of that view of the town, to create "a tangible reality, which is also an iconic image. The physical presence, serenity and beauty of Delft are there to be admired but only from a distance. The city cannot be approached from the viewpoint Vermeer chose ..." You don't need to know anything about art to respond to this painting. You have only to see it to savour it.
OF course, it will still be in The Hague when this exhibition ends. But other treasures, such as Queen Elizabeth's Music Lesson and the Metropolitan's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and Washington's The Girl with the Red Hat and our The Letter will return to their homes, and perhaps never be together again. They add up to one of the most compelling statements ever made no less compelling for being so mysterious. Often, the viewer does not know what exactly was or is happening in the pictures why this woman holds out a pearl necklace, what that one is writing, whether that one is weighing something or not. This release from anecdote is part of their genius. You stand there, free, to see how the paint makes them, and to feel their complex harmonies, and to revel in the mastery which led Vermeer to do shockingly unexpected things with colour and form, just because he could.
It is almost too much. Ideally, one would go out to the exhibition cafe after an hour or two and come back in again, but this is not allowed. So a half day is about as much as anyone will be able to spend in the rooms. What to do then?
Well, I had a very good re entry to the atmosphere. Just across the square from the gallery is one of the world's most lavish hotels, the Hotel Des Indes Inter Continental, where Mata Hari entertained her admirers and the ballerina, Anna Pavlova lived and died. The dining room is properly grand, and the cooking, on the evidence of one lunch, is wonderful. Two courses - veal in a foie gras sauce with a crepe filled with spring vegetables and asparagus, and a dessert of tart let of blueberries and vanilla cream, with a couple of glasses of a pinot gris, cost about £35. Then I got the train to Delft. What else would one want to do but pay one's respects?
The church where Vermeer was baptised, and whose sunlit tower dominates the View of Delft - a homage to the House of Orange, whose princes are buried there stands at one end of the market square; the city hall, where the Vermeer marriage banns were posted, at the other. A few hundred yards away, reached down quiet canal lined streets, is the Oude Kerk, the old church. I stood at the spot where, scholars think, Vermeer was interred. He was only 43 when he died. When his body died, that is to say. His self is not dead.
And that night, back in Amsterdam things took a turn for the cheerful, as they often do in that laid back city. A restaurant near the hotel gone in to just because it was there - turned out to be a cross dresser's steakhouse with a wonderfully slapdash cabaret consisting of young men in sequinned make up and huge falsies and a kind of milkmaid drag miming to Broadway musical numbers. The waiter was wearing a long white waiter's apron when he turned round, he had rubber buttocks on, and a condom holding back his ponytail. The diners were singing along and enjoying themselves, but the pleasant thing was how much the staff were enjoying themselves. The food, I may say, is not the point.
Singing along with Ethel Merman in Dutch was an ideal way to end The Day That Had Everything. Modern Holland provided the good trains and sensible arrangements and helpful people. The Golden Age of Dutch painting provided the Vermeer images which in the words of the catalogue introduction "found and conveyed values and emotions of lasting, concern, transforming reality and reflecting upon the timeless aspects of the human condition The combination is perfect. It is well worth visiting the country, and the Royal Cabinet of Paintings at the Mauritshuis at any time. But if you can go now, and if you can get in to the exhibition begging, borrowing, and stealing are perfectly in order.