For a second, the only sound you hear is the little beep of your ticket being scanned, your fingers grasping it gently in fear of wrinkling the paper. And then, you pass into the welcoming hall.
And your world breaks into noise, becomes colour.
The darkened walls give the space the endlessness of a night sky. In place of its stars, there hang from the ceiling a thousand vibrant flowers, cradled by water in glass, shaping a dome above you. For a moment, that is the only thing you gaze up at as you walk, enamoured by the honeyed scent of a waking world, almost bumping into the information desk. One blossom for each visitor here, all as curious as yourself.
The hall breaks into three pathways, and you make your choice.
The darkness of the room paves way to bright champagne light, which bubbles softly against your arms. Perfume of the passersby mingles with a more enduring scent of time, of old wood and older stories. Galleries of antiques spring around you, statues and tapestries, jewellery and books. One owner offers you a warm smile as you pass, amused by the awe expressed so purely on your face. You take one turn, and another, and finally, intrigued by a glimpse of medieval style illustrations, you make the decision to first enter Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books.
Perhaps, you are already familiar with the intricacy of manuscripts from the Western European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But seeing from up close such detail and creativity carved with unimaginable precision into each page, you grasp more than ever before the treasured nature of books. The invention of pouring one’s soul onto paper, and the art of preserving it throughout centuries. You cannot read the words or the notes, so you rely on the illustrations instead. Your eyes venture faith and tragedy, Spring flowers and bloodshed. Depicted scenes tangle with your own imagined explanations for them. Many minutes pass before you remember how much more there is to see, and urge your legs to take you back out into the hallway, wishing the gallerists a lovely day on your way out.
The antiques become contemporary art pieces, and a couple hallways later, they become paintings. And this is where your minutes unnoticeably slip into hours. Each gallery opens up like a rabbit-hole for you to fall into. You wander landscapes and palaces, you feel turquoise waters of sailed seas splash against your sun-licked skin and snowflakes as they fall from bare trees and through the violet skies to kiss you. You climb mountains and hear your singing voice echo through enchanted forests. You encounter passion-enveloped performers and muses bathing in silk, satyrs and nymphs in bacchanal dances. One moment, you are shivering in the gloomy Autumnal streets of the Hague, and the next, you can taste the cloudless skies of Venice. You twirl back and forth through hundreds of years until your head spins.
It occurs to you during your visit to MacConnal-Mason Gallery, why, despite their being so different from one another, there is an intangible yet evident connection between all these paintings. You survey an impatient child, his hand held by his mother as she buys flowers from a late-nineteenth-century Parisian street vendor. You can hear the requests to wait and stay still, just for a minute, because, once upon a time, they were employed to keep you from getting into trouble. The playful smile of the girl over there from a hundred and fifty years ago remembers a darling, bold friend of yours. The water from that eighteenth-century spring might be the same water you gulped down greedily on a blazing Summer day last year. A group of seventeenth-century friends are dancing, the same vivacious energy flowing through their limbs that caused you to turn the music up and spin around your room a few evenings ago. And in all the paintings of snowy landscapes, you see people skating, and playing, and conversing around the warmth of fire, and it is of no matter which century the scene was captured in. It never changes. To play in the snow and to seek warmth is in our nature rather than something taught and mastered. Long before fighting, there was playing; long before betrayal, there was dancing. We have always been human, before we became anything else. You think you will write this thought down in your journal when you get home. Just as so many before you have, whether they were well-established poets or youths wild with hope for the life ahead.
In Galerie Tanakaya, you marvel at Japanese woodblock prints and paintings. You can almost smell the moonlit nights, hear your footsteps in the soft snow. It is in front of a snowy landscape, when you stand imagining the vicious January wind unraveling your hair, that you feel another patron pause beside you. You acknowledge one another with a smile, and a smile soon blooms into an exchange of names, a few minutes of traded remarks. When you part outside the gallery, the stranger thanks you for a lovely conversation. You find yourself blushing, ever so slightly. In a place with so endlessly much to look at, to be seen feels like a compliment, a small gift.
You are walking past the bar, listening to the melody of clinking glasses of white wine, in the direction from which you came (or so you think, at least. It really is impossible to tell, and you have never been too great with maps). Feeling you have already spent a little longer than you had planned here, you take out your phone to check the time. Immediately, the act is followed by a dozen burning glares on your back, and you turn to see a gallery of slightly offended clocks below the title Mentink & Roest. You mumble an apology to the ones on the nearest shelves as you enter. The title cards proudly announce different centuries, increasingly distant. A nineteenth-century pocket watch in a caress of gold makes you wish you had one of those old-fashioned suits to wear it with. A sixteenth-century wall clock weaves around itself an image of the home it once belonged to. And, just when you raise your eyes from a clock encased in an indigo box marked with little dots of gold (the artist might or might not have been the night herself), you see one that immediately claims the spot of your favourite. Having ventured here all the way from 1780s England, it is an organ bracket clock surrounded by elaborately wrought gold and ruby coloured stone that shape it into an imitation of a tower. The face is surrounded by a painting of boats sailing through summer waters past cities and ruins and egg-yolk-yellow skies. As you leave, you feel an inarticulate thrill in having defyingly walked backwards past centuries, in a place made of ever-advancing time.
The crowd has remained dense ever since you entered. You hear phone calls and a dozen different languages, conversations on the origins of one piece and the value of another. Sights of new suits and flawlessly applied lipstick rush past. An occasional excuse me rises from somewhere nearby as elbows of wanderers brush past elbows of patrons with a determined destination in mind. Images of the great cities you have been to, have dreamt of, flash through your mind. Paris, Rome, New York. The places you could spend days, months in, and just when you think you have seen it all, spectacularly, there is a new pathway to take, a new source of beauty to witness.
But no matter where you are, the day must meet its end. Your legs ache slightly, though your eyes remain wide with starry specks of admiration, scanning each gallery, deciding which to enter last.
Before you can pick one yourself, a potent scent of time and sea salt engulfs you, ushering you to approach its source. You read the name above before you enter the darkened room - Zebregs & Röell. Around you, visitors become witnesses to dozens of stories of exploration - swords and ship models, treasure cabinets and curiosities taken from distant lands. A collection of black, ornately carved wood chairs from the seventeenth century makes you think of vicious rulers of lands where the air is perpetually soaked in salt and gloom. You catch your reflection in a glass case, protecting taxidermy birds, their feathers a lush shade of emerald and garnet. It is still you looking back, of course, but it is you from years ago, standing on your tiptoes in an attempt to meet your eye. From when the world felt endless and in your daydreams, you saw all of it yourself, captain of a grand ship, a puddle on your neighbourhood sidewalk for the ocean, a branch clasped within your tiny fingers for a sword, early Spring flowers and trinkets for treasure. And now, it all grows to life around you, and it is something between wonder and amusement which finds you, in a realisation that all your imaginings were tangled with someone else’s memories. That once, people really did live like this - wild with freedom, starved for what lay beyond the horizon.
The entrance now becomes the exit, the thousand floating flowers now each a tiny farewell. And you, too, are now something a little different from the you who entered here hours ago. Instead of the ticket, your hands are holding catalogues you have picked up to flip through on your way home, and a couple of postcards which will be sent to dear friends. The cool evening greets you as you leave the MECC, settling and rosy-cheeked. You do not realise how wide the smile you are carrying is.
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