The celebrations of the Hudson 400 year are not limited to this side of the Atlantic — there are also many events and museum exhibitions in the Netherlands. One of the highlights is an exhibition in the Westfries Museum in Hoorn, Hollanders aan de Hudson, of works of Len Tantillo.

Mr. Tantillo (Poughkeepsie, 1947) is an artist and historian with a passion for the Hudson River region. An architect by training, he has recreated many historical views of New York, Albany and other places through beautiful paintings and drawings. The Westfries Museum has nearly 60 of his works on display in the exhibition about ‘the Dutch at the Hudson’.

The Westfries Museum is a museum for regional history in Hoorn, a city with an extensive history. Hoorn was one of the cities that operated the Dutch East India Company (“VOC”), the trading company that commissioned Henry Hudson to find an easterly passage to Asia. The museum has an extensive collection paintings and objects, including many of the VOC.

The exhibition opened September 5th with Mr. Tantillo and his wife Corliss in attendance. The American Consular General to the Netherlands, Julie Ruterbories, was representing the American Embassy (the new American Ambassador Hartor Levin was in New York to attend the ceremonies around NY400).

Americans and Dutch will appreciate Manhattan, 1660, a gorgeous reproduction of the ‘skyline’ of Manhattan 350 years ago. It’s interesting to compare this work with the drawing by Johannes Vingboons, made in 1656 with the view of the island Manhattan from the sea which is currently on display in the South Point museum.

The excellent brochure of the museum describes the effort Mr. Tantillo put into creating a realistic sky-line for Manhattan, 1660. “Creating an historic painting from colonial times, without the help of photographic material and using only a few, usually primitive sketches, is a formidable challenge. It takes a lot of time and intensive research. An important source for this painting is the birds-eye map by Jacques Cortelyou which was made around 1660. This map, the ‘Castello map’, is on display in Florence, Italy”. Mr. Tantillo goes on to explain the research he did to verify the accuracy of the map, and what it takes to translate a map into a skyline, using another map from 1890 and even digital models.

Most of the around 60 paintings in the exhibitions are in private hand; a number of them are on loan from the artist himself. One of the paintings in the exhibition, A View of Fort Orange, is on loan from the Fort Orange Club from Albany, NY. Members of the club were making a tour through the Netherlands and were in attendance of the opening of the exhibition.

The Westfries Museum does not own works by Mr. Tantillo yet but according to Ad Geerdink, director of the museum, there are plans for Mr. Tantillo to create a painting with the city of Hoorn in the late Middle Ages as theme.

No word yet if this exhibition will be displayed in the United States. For those of you in the New York area it is worth a visit to the New York State Museum where the 1609 exhibition displays paintings by Mr. Tantillo through March 7, 2010. On October 3rd, 2009 Mr. Tantillo will speak at the Rensselaerswijck Seminar in Albany, NY. His work can also been seen in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

West Fries Museum, Holland aan de Hudson
http://www.wfm.nl
through November 29, 2009

This Sunday Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende will visit the Brooklyn Museum, joined by Minister of Foreign Affairs Verhagen and Minister for Development Cooperation Koenders.

As we wrote before, the Brooklyn museum is hosting various special events this year around the Schenck Houses, two early Dutch colonial houses. The wooden houses suggest the way a Dutch American family might have lived in Brooklyn over a period of 150 years. They were moved to the Brooklyn museum in 1929 and 1964, and after a renovation in 2007 they are standing next to each other on the fourth floor of the museum.

Breuckelen, as its first name was, was named for Breukelen in the province of Utrecht in the Netherlands when it was authorized by the Dutch West India Company in 1646. Brooklyn’s official motto is still in old-Dutch: Eendraght Maeckt Maght. Obviously a source of pride for the ‘original Brooklyn’ in Utrecht, there is a special website to celebrate the Brooklyn Connection, part of BrooklynBridgeBreukelen.

With the NY400 week now officially over and Crown Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Maxima back in The Hague today to open the parliamentary year, there are still plenty of events in the New York area.

In addition to the art exhibitions we wrote about earlier there are a number of other museums that pay special attention to the celebration of Dutch American ties.

Here’s a list with 10 museum exhibitions throughout the next few months:

• Through September 27: Mannahatta Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City (Museum of the City of New York)
• Through September 27: the Worlds of Henry Hudson (also in the Museum of the City of New York)
• Through September 27: Dutch Treats: Highlights from the collection of George Way (Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden)
• Through October 17: Actien Handel: Early Dutch Finance and the Founding of America (Museum of American Finance)
• Through November 10: The Half Moon (Halve Maen) replica will be available for tours. See the website for its schedule.
• Through December 31: When Brooklyn was Breukelen: A Celebration of the Schenck Houses (Brooklyn Museum)
• Through December 31: Dutch Culinary Traditions in America (Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden)
• Through January 10, 2010: Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (Hudson River Museum)
• Through March 7, 2010: 1609 (New York State Museum, Albany)
• Through July 26, 2010: Double Dutch – 400 years after Henry Hudson discovering new frontiers in contemporary Dutch art (The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art)

So, there is plenty to do this fall in the NY area for those interested in Dutch American history and culture.

The moon rock that was a prized part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam turned out to be false. A few weeks ago researchers of the Vrije University announced that the moon rock was in fact petrified wood, possibly from Arizona.

The ‘moon rock’ had been a gift to Prime Minister Willem Drees by the American Ambassador when the three Apollo 11 astronauts visited the Netherlands in 1969.

After Willem Drees passed away in 1988, the moon rock was presented to the Rijksmuseum. According to Novum/AP this may have been where things got a little confused:

“Spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder said that after it received the moon rock in 1992 from the heirs of Mr. Drees the museum verified with NASA if this was indeed a moon rock. Without physical inspection, NASA said it was ‘possibly’ a moon rock. However, the rock was 89 grams — much bigger than most other moon rocks that the US government has given to other countries over the years.

The Epoch Times adds: “There is much speculation about the purpose of giving the stone as a gift. Was the stone intentionally given to mislead people, or did Drees misinterpret the gift?

Van Gelder continued, “On the card that was given along with the stone, it did not literally say that it was a moon stone … But what is odd about it: ‘Why would you give such an insignificant stone as a keepsake?’ I don’t get that.”

In any case, you won’t have to go without seeing moon stone in Netherlands this fall. The Boerhaave Museum in Leiden has extended their moon exhibition with 4 weeks, and through September 30 you can visit their display of undisputed moon rock.

Two tiny pieces of moon rock are on display in Leiden; one from Apollo 11 from Mare Tranquillitatis, the other from Apollo 17, the last flight to the moon. Both were gifts by President Nixon to Queen Juliana who donated them to the museum.