My favorite piece at the Rijksmuseum -- which is massive and exhausting; I saw perhaps a hundredth of the exhibition -- doesn't whisper strange mantic riddles or occult geometry. It's George Breitner's Bridge Over de Singel at Paleisstraat (1897). The painting, like many of Vermeer's, resembles (perhaps derives from?) a photograph. But that's where the similarities end: where Vermeers look painstakingly composed, elaborately staged, and minutely rendered, Bridge Over de Singel could have been made from a print accidentally snapped by a tourist trying to jam a disposable camera back into her purse. It's a winter scene in the Negen Straatjes area of Amsterdam; perhaps it's Christmastime. Snow covers the bridge, which is crowded with people and a dog, and the buildings. The woman in the foreground -- too far in, it seems, so that she's almost accosting the viewer -- is cut off from below, and she's out of focus. The whole canvas, in fact, is intentionally blurred, giving the scene a jarred, restive, almost jazzlike feel. I like the piece for a lot of reasons, but the first is that I crossed that bridge on foot several times while I was in Amsterdam. Even though it was summer 2003, the scene felt much the same, and I felt myself joining a popular march of history when I thought of my steps and Breitner's jolting brushstrokes. So maybe we like art, finally, because it reminds us of what we did this week.

But no matter your agenda, you can't discuss Dutch art without Vincent Van Gogh. He towers so high over his compatriots -- Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, all of them -- that the Rijksmuseum has a separate building, with its own hours and administration, just to manage him. I feel a personal connection to Van Gogh: our astrologies are very similar, and we both experienced a rare Saturn transit -- the planet came to our 'progressed' suns -- that effected major changes in our lives. For Van Gogh, unfortunately, it was suicide. Nothing so gruesome for me, but Saturn's progress did radically redirect mine. My astrologer says Saturn is big on 'skillful means'. In other words, the planet forces hard, sober choices wherever it crosses your chart. In my particular configuration, a great hungry vulture seemed to be sitting on my shoulders for eighteen months, whispering in my ear: "Forget it. You'll never get out. Quit while you're nowhere." If you're alert and strong, you start making plans -- quick -- and then you figure out how act on them: skillful means. But Van Gogh was weak; he'd suffered breakdowns for years before the deadly Saturn manifestation; and the great black bird began to prey upon him. Although he kept moving from place to place -- in fact Van Gogh isn't exactly a 'Dutch' painter if you consider that he did much of his best work in France (he's buried there, too) -- he couldn't shake the stars, his attachments, his misery.

Van Gogh killed himself in 1890, when he was thirty-seven. He may have had great work ahead of him, but he also left quite a bit behind: 800 paintings and 700 drawings. He must often, in a few stormy, feverish hours, have done a whole canvas of those trademark thick strokes and vivid color swaths. Van Gogh made eighty paintings in the two months before he died. Such prolificacy is to be expected from a former aspiring minister who was fired from his missionary work for overzealousness -- and who was a paranoid schizophrenic (manic depression seems a truer diagnosis, in retrospect). Vermeer's tiny parturition adds up by aesthetic comparison. Each of his laborious, super-calibrated pieces probably took months to design and accomplish; he might have spent a whole day plotting a single beam of light. Van Gogh could not have sustained the attention to execute a Vermeer; and Vermeer was too meticulous a draughtsman to do Van Gogh's wild volutions.

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