A Family's Legacy on Show In Amsterdam
By CHARLES LOCKWOOD; Charles Lockwood, a frequent visitor to the Netherlands, is the author of seven books about architecture and cities.
Published: November 22, 1987
THE van Loon Museum offers visitors the opportunity to step inside one of Amsterdam's great homes and discover how the 17th- and 18th-century merchant princes of the Netherlands lived.
The van Loon Museum, housed in a 1671 mansion, is completely furnished with several centuries of this family's furniture, carpets, china and silver - plus more than 50 portraits, many dating from the 17th-century golden age of Dutch painting.
This is, moreover, one of the last of Amsterdam's great houses to be occupied by a leading ''old family,'' descendants of Willem van Loon (1537-1618), one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company. The first-floor main rooms and the second-floor bedrooms are open to the public on Mondays; Maurits and Ghislaine van Loon live on the third floor. The presence of the van Loons gives the museum portion of their home a genuinely lived-in feeling that is missing from most house museums. The dining room, for instance, is furnished down to the occupants' 18th-century silver on the table and their porcelain in the china cabinets.
In keeping with this domestic mood, visitors can wander through all the rooms at will. No wooden barriers. No ropes. No obligatory tours.
Situated at 672 Keizersgracht, the van Loon Museum faces one of the three concentric semicircular canals that ring central Amsterdam. These canals - the Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht - were laid out during Amsterdam's 17th-century mercantile heyday.
The gabled row houses and mansions along these waterways still exemplify that era's appreciation of a pleasing urban scale, discreetly elegant architectural style and skilled craftsmanship - all qualities evident at the van Loon Museum. Indeed, the three canals, where some of the larger houses are now occupied by corporate and professional offices, form the most pleasing streetscapes in contemporary Amsterdam.
Like most of the houses on the Keizersgracht, the van Loon Museum's street front gives little hint of the treasures within. The basement and three-story-tall facade is a handsomely weathered gray sandstone, free of embellishment other than the pilasters by its front doorway and the roofline balustrade with its central family crest flanked by a classical statue.
For most Amsterdam residents, in fact, the mansion's most notable exterior feature is its window glass, which has turned a pale violet with the passing centuries. In fact, residents often call the van Loon Museum the house of the purple windows.
On ascending this mansion's stone stoop and walking through its double front doorway, visitors enter a long, marble-floored hall running the length of the house. The furnishings of this hallway include several chairs, two antique chests, a grandfather clock and a child's 18th-century sleigh.
But the most interesting objects are various van Loon family portraits. Two of these historic canvases depict Willem van Loon and his wife, Petronella van Roy (1542-1606).
Toward the back of the hallway, the family portraits move a generation ahead as visitors see Hans van Loon (1577-1658), Willem's son, and Hans's wife, Anna Ruychaver (1573-1649), depicted as a couple in two different portraits. The lower pair of canvases portray Hans and Anna van Loon at 46 and 49 years old respectively. The upper pair shows the then-elderly couple in 1644, just three years before they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.
Nearby, a 1637 group portrait painted by Jan Miense Molenaer continues the family tree by another generation, because it depicts the van Loons at the marriage party of Willem (1605-1645), son of Hans and Anna van Loon's, and Willem's second wife, Margaretha Bas (1608-1679).
With its typical use of symbolism and its glimpses into Dutch society of that era, this group portrait is a splendid example of 17th-century Dutch painting.
''The newlywed Willem and Margaretha van Loon are seated in the center of the room, next to a hunting dog, which implies marital fidelity.'' explained the French-born Ghislaine van Loon, who occasionally shows visitors around the house. Margaretha van Loon holds the hand of her two-year-old stepson. Though wearing long hair and a dress, this child is clearly a boy, because he is playing with a top - a toy that was customarily only for boys in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Moreover, his lace collar is square, which was the male fashion, whereas a girl's collar would have been pointed.
Elsewhere in the canvas, Willem van Loon's brothers and sisters greet friends, pour wine for guests or talk with their own spouses.
''But one of Willem van Loon's brothers, Hans, is missing,'' said Mrs. van Loon. ''He died during a campaign against the Spanish army four years earlier. And his death is indicated by the chair that has tipped over. A dog sits next to the chair, a sign that the family still cherishes Hans's memory.''
The central hallway opens onto two rooms on each side. On the right, the blue drawing room overlooks the Keizersgracht. With 16-foot ceilings, this room is furnished with 18th-century Dutch furniture, Persian carpets, several Chinese screens, an Italian bronze chandelier, an 18th-century French commode by cabinetmaker F. A. Mondon and a 19th-century English clavier - plus, of course, more van Loon family portraits. The highlights of this room are its elaborate neo-classical carved woodwork and plaster ceiling ornament, which date from the mansion's redecoration between 1752 and 1770.
ACROSS the hall is the dining room, furnished with splendid 18th-century Dutch china cabinets, Persian carpets and more family portraits. Rather than one long rectangular dining table, however, there are two circular tables, a more modern style, each fully set with china and silver for six.
Behind the dining room, at the back of the van Loon mansion, the red smoking room is furnished with French and Italian antiques, and it has a vitrine displaying gold medals struck for various generations of the family's couples celebrating their 50th wedding anniversaries.
The other room at the back of the house is used for the museum's offices. The hallway ends in the garden room, where French doors open onto a formal garden with beds of flowers, carefully trimmed hedges and a pavilion inspired by a Greek temple.
Strolling through the garden before heading up to the van Loon Museum's second-floor bedrooms, visitors often marvel at the several continuous centuries of family tradition they have just experienced inside the mansion. Evidence, such as 19th-century circular tables in the dining room or the photographic portraits of 20th-century family members, seems to indicate the van Loons' longstanding occupancy of this house.
The museum's guidebook, however, indicates that the van Loons moved into their Keizersgracht mansion in 1884, bringing with them their furniture and portraits from earlier family homes. According to the guidebook, Flemish merchant Jeremias van Raey actually built the mansion in 1671. The couchant stag coat-of-arms at the roofline balustrade is van Raey's heraldic shield.
But van Raey apparently never occupied the house; rather, he rented the property out. Its first resident was the Dutch painter Ferdinand Bol, a pupil of Rembrandt's whose work is sometimes attributed to his master. Despite Bol's professional success, he retired from painting soon after marrying a rich wife in 1669.
After Bol, financial and romantic tragedy overtook many of the house's residents. Jeremias Van Raey went bankrupt and lost the property. The second owner's daughter, Geertruyd le Gillon, paid her ex-fiance 100,000 guilders for breach of promise. The string of bad luck ended only after 1884 when Hendrik van Loon purchased the house as a wedding present for Willem, his son, and Willem's bride, Thora Egidius.
The late-19th- and early-20th-century world of the van Loons becomes more apparent in the mansion's second-floor bedrooms. Although these four rooms have 18-century marble fireplaces and furniture, the framed photographs and most of the portraits are more recent, such as Flora van Loon in her gown as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Wilhelmina.
After her husband's death in 1935, Flora van Loon continued to live in the mansion, with several servants and frequent family visitors. One of the regular guests was her grandson, Maurits van Loon, who now occupies the house with his wife, Ghislaine.
A professor of archaeology at the University of Amsterdam, Maurits van Loon has a keen eye for detail and a gift for unraveling the past, particularly in his family home, which was periodically ''modernized'' by various owners.
''As a boy visiting my grandmother in the 1920's and 1930's, I thought I saw letters in the swirling brass metalwork of the staircase railing as it ran from the first to the second floor,'' recalled Maurits van Loon. ''I told my grandmother what I saw, but she said that it was my imagination.''
As a young adult, Professor van Loon said, he finally deciphered the letters, which had been obscured by the later additions of 'child-safety' metalwork in the balustrade. The letters were VHAGN from the first floor to the midway landing and TRIP from the landing to the second floor. ''The letters stand for Alexander van Hagen, who purchased the property in 1752, and his wife, Catharina Trip,'' the professor said.
After Flora van Loon's death in 1945, her son inherited the house. With his death four years later, ownership passed to Maurits van Loon, then in his late 20's.
BY the mid-1960's, the van Loon mansion required considerable repairs.
Having established his academic career as an expert on Mesopotamia, Maurits van Loon had time to update the house's antiquated plumbing and electrical wiring and to replace the decaying wooden pilings beneath the building with concrete columns. He and his wife also restored many 18th-century decorative details that had been covered up or removed during later redecorations, and they began to assemble 17th- and 18th-century van Loon furniture and portraits in order to give the rooms the look of a house that had been occupied by the same family for several centuries.
After completing the restoration in 1973, the van Loons offered the house to the city of Amsterdam as a museum. The city turned down the gift, saying that it already had too many museums. So, the van Loons opened the mansion on their own.
Over a decade later, the van Loons remain enthusiastic about their museum and continue to acquire family furniture and paintings from relatives or dealers. ''The museum is a duty, yes,'' Ghislaine van Loon says, ''but we do it out of love for the house and family as well.''
The van Loon Museum is at 672 Keizersgracht in central Amsterdam. The museum is open on Monday only, from 10 A.M. to noon and 1 to 4 P.M. Admission is about $1.50.
photos of the van Loon Museum; the mansion, decorated with antiques; Maurits and Ghislaine van Loon (Randolph Harrison)