A painting with a big story. The first one without Nosybirds.

There are a lot of items in Amsterdam which are enormously interesting and fun to paint. For different reasons, I am fascinated by a special place called “The Golden Bend” (De Gouden Bocht). It is the name of a part of the “Herengracht” located between “Vijzelstraat” and “Koningsplein”. We are talking about the ancient center of Amsterdam. This part is build around 1670.

In this area of you feel the prosperity during the Golden Age. The famous Dutch Golden Age painter, Berckheyde (1638-1698) created a beautiful painting of this area. Of course there are more pictures, but this one inspired me very much to start a painting of the Golden Bend. 

My painting however is different. When you take a closer look, you see that the fronts of the houses are different on a happy way. These fronts tell you something. To mention a few, one of the major elements of the Golden Bend is “money”. Therefore I gave the front of the left house a money-design coming from the Gulden Florijn (f). This money was often earned by the VOC . The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century with East India countries. So you find different styles of these countries in the two other houses next to the first mentioned.

The houses tell you also about famous Dutch art some centuries later. So I gave two fronts a Mondriaan and Van Gogh face. Finally to emphasis our liberal atmosphere, you see one house with lots of "peace" signs. My intention was to give this painting a bit of so called “wallpower”. It attracts the eye. It was really fun to make and I hope you can find it back in this colorful painting.