HOLLAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 278, 20 October 1944, Page 5

HOLLAND

Sir-yYou would oblige me greatly by publishing this letter in answer to the "Diary of a New Zealander,’ who believes she has seen Holland. I am a Dutchman who knows my country very intimately, and wish I could have guided your friefMd instead of leaving her to snobbish, ignorant little Ann. Let me correct some of her wrong impressions. When Holland was free, the bulbfields were visited by all "classes," the period of their flowering being a kind of spring festival which even impresses the Dutch every year afresh, and in which young and old, poor and rich, used to participate. What a pity to have wasted time looking at the torture chambers in de Gevangenpoort; if your contributor had walked another 100 yards, she could have seen Holland in the pictures of Rembrandt, Vermeer and — Pieter de Hoogh in the intimate surroundings of the. Mauritshuis. That might have corrected her "erroneous ideas" on Holland better than looking at old thumbscrews, which, after all, can be seen in every Continental museum. Also German cars in Holland were an exception; American cars were ‘the rule. I am sorry she thought my countrymen "rather inartistic’? people. Ann apparently could not tell her that some of them were rather prominent in art, in spite of their looks. As for the island of Marken, that is an institution made for Americans who "do" Holland with Cooks’ Tours in 48 hours. Few Dutch people ever go there. Instead of letting her waste her time there, I should have guided your contributor through the modern quarters of Amsterdam, where masterpieces of our young architects can been seen: de Bazel, Dudok and de Clerq, wlio made modern Dutch architecture famous in the whole world. Unfortunately Ann was her guide and not I, who .could have shown her some of the wealth of my country which now may irretrievably be lost, and, indeed the Holland which she missed become "a place to read of and

not to see."’-

F.

S-r.

(Wellington).