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If there are two museums you want to visit that are relatively close together, but far from your home, you might as well make a weekend trip out of it. So on a Saturday we set off towards Leiden, to visit the Sieboldhuis. Dr Siebold was a German doctor who was part of the Dutch ‘factory’ at Deshima — the artificial island on the coast of Nagasaki where the Dutch were allowed to reside and trade with shogunate-era Japan. Dr Siebold could operate on cataracts, something that the Japanese doctors were not able to do. But he was not allowed to take payment for his services, so request a lot of gifts (Japanese culture is big on returning favours with gifts) and he requested scale models of houses, maps and other cultural artefacts. After his tour on Deshima ended, Dr Siebold lived in Leiden, in the house that is now a museum that houses his collection.

We’ve been there before, but this time we were there for the special exhibition with souvenir photos from Japan around the time it was opening up. (Vox has a video on these photos.) There are a lot of studio-posed photos, but there is also a lot of landscape photography (sometimes replicating collections of woodcuts made to show famous landscapes) and even news photography.

Of course we had been in Leiden before, but staying overnight impressed on me how shabby everything is. It’s a nice city, but the places we went for dinner and breakfast the next day were both kinda grungy. I mean, any student town will have its grimy corners, but it really stood out to me.

The next day, after breakfast, we saddled up and drove to Schiedam, to visit the municipal museum there for an exhibit on Yayoi Kusama. Turns out that Kusama visited the Netherlands quite a few times while she resided in New York, and even had some exhibitions in the museum in Schiedam back then. The most interesting, to me, were the video interviews with people who worked with her back then. Fascinating to see the interaction between the Dutch art scene back then and Kusama’s art!

After visiting the exhibit and wandering around for a bit more, we found a (decidedly un-grungy) cafe where we had lunch before returning home.