Rijksmuseum

Adrianus Marchal, Friezen Meeren, Nederland, oil on board, 1946

20 May 2016

Today I’m returning to the Rijksmuseum for an unexpected afternoon of research in the studiezaal. It is a joy for me to be working on Invisible Fingerprints again, after a year filled with the impossibility of searching for three men in the unimaginably vast Indian Ocean. When my sister Catherine and I undertook the first step in the journey that would become my book, if I thought of sailing boats at all, it was the ones that my  grandfather would sail in the waters around Amsterdam as a teenager. Opa didn’t claim to be much of a sailor but he loved being on the water and in the sun – two things that saw  he and Oma make the seaside village of Umhlanga Rocks their last home in South Africa, before returning to the Netherlands. But, over this past year, I’ve thought about yachts every single day – sometimes all day – as events around Anthony’s disappearance at sea unfolded. Now I’m turning my thoughts to my great-grandfather working in the paper restoration studio in the eaves of the Rijksmuseum, a painting that he made has suddenly come into my mind. It’s an oil of a small yacht, slicing its way across a lake somewhere in Holland, and it’s hung on the walls of my mother’s home in Umhlanga for as long as I can remember. I haven’t seen the blue and brown-hued artwork in a while. Will it feel different looking at it now, thinking of Anthony and everything that’s happened? How do the events of life contribute to our own ways of seeing? With that thought in mind, I’m returning to the Rijksmuseum once again.