Golden Earring – Back Home

3 September 2011 - 26 February 2012

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hague rock band Golden Earring, the Historical Museum of the Hague has organised the exhibition Golden Earring – Back Home from 3 September 2011 until 26 February 2012. With singles, LPs, posters, t-shirts, instruments and portraits, the exhibition paints a rich picture of 50 years of Golden Earring. Considerable attention is, of course, given to the music itself, with the exhibition also focusing on the nightlife of the 1960s and 1970s. Become better acquainted with the band from a reconstructed teenager’s bedroom, on stage and in the studio. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Museum RockArt and Jaap Schut is its guest curator.

Between Fantasy and Reality

The cityscapes of B.J. van Hove (1790-1880)

28 January to 29 April 2012

The landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout had some wise words of advice for his nephew B.J. van Hove: “Bart, you’d do better painting houses: just stick to townscapes.” And so it came to pass. Bart van Hove painted his first cityscape in 1818. He concentrated on The Hague, but he also recorded the streets, squares and canals of many other cities, as they appeared during the 19th century. He was less concerned with photographic accuracy: what he wanted was to create beautiful paintings. If a building needed to be moved a little to improve the composition, he wouldn’t hesitate. In this way he combined reality with touches of fantasy. But in fact the opposite was more frequent: his innumerable fantasy townscapes include fragments of reality. He made use of existing building styles for the houses, churches and other buildings, so that we are able to recognise familiar churches like Harlem’s Bakenesserkerk or Delft’s Oude Kerk amidst all the fantasy architecture. 

In his own time, Van Hove was known not only as a painter of townscapes, he was also responsible for painting backdrops for at least 100 operas and plays for the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague. Six of these have been preserved, but at 8 x 10 metres they are too large to be displayed in the museum. However, modern multimedia facilities allow us to give an impression of these pieces in the exhibition.

Around 75 paintings and watercolours, many in private ownership, have now been brought together in this first major retrospective of his work. In Between Fantasy and Reality: The cityscapes of B.J. van Hove, the Historical Museum of The Hague pays a fitting tribute to this relatively unknown painter.