And what has a mailman to do with it all??

To round of the theme of this semester: the science of love, the love of science, the love of love and the science of science, etc., the Intermania themselves have subjected themselves to a foolproof method to find their love for each other; the committee went on a treasure hunt to find love-related art pieces in the Kröller-Muller museum. Need I say more? 

To paint the scene: ‘twas a half sunny Sunday-morning when we arrived in nature park ‘De Hoge Veluwe’. The museum is located on this protected nature reserve where wild animals can roam around, which is a quite serene way to begin the experience of the museum. We took the free* bikes to the museum and were greeted by extremely friendly staff. We quickly found our way to the treasure booklets, where some member of the committee obviously had to take the children’s tour, and could begin our journey.  

The treasure hunt works as follows: You get a booklet composed of four small cards. On the front, there are some small snippets of works of art, and on the back, there are some questions related to love, loss, friendship, and more. Once you find the artwork that is hinted at on the front, you read the questions and try to answer them to one another.  

I will not spoil all details of the tour, as you probably will want to visit the museum yourself after reading this article, but I will mention one of the paintings that stood out to me most. The painting in questions was a van Gogh portrait of his friend the mailman Joseph Roulin. Funnily enough, this painting was featured in both the children’s tour for funsies, as well as on our love tour.  

From the small subscript next to the painting we learn that Vincent met Joseph when he moved to south of France at the end of his life. For the non-van Gogh stans, it is good to know that Vincent was pretty depressed in this stage of his life, mainly due to life. Josep was a ‘friendly, always-whistling, only non-bitter person’ at this moment in the Vincents life, who had frequent interactions with each other as Vincent used to send paintings to his brother still residing in the Netherlands.  

After we had a thorough look at this painting and pondered at the colourful flowers painted by van Gogh during his depressed days, we took a look at the questions. And it is exactly these questions that I want to pose to you, dear reader. What do the colours in this painting say about the feelings van Gogh had for this person? Why did you think van Gogh made this painting? What is the last thing have you done for a person you cared for? And why? 

Closing down this theme, we hope that you have come a little closer to the things you’re passionate about, a little further from the things you hate, and have overall learnt a little bit more about the world. Okay maybe most of it was not as sappy as this article, but nonetheless, we hope you enjoyed! 

Kisses from the Intermania! 

*note that free here means that you can take the bikes once you paid 15 euro’s to enter the park ;)