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Visiting Professor from Holland, Xander van Eck: Lecturing about Rembrandt at Rutgers as a Dutch Vistitor
As the fall semester I spent here at Rutgers is almost over, it is time to look back. My family and I have had a great time here, full of interesting events like the presidential elections, Halloween and Thanksgiving. We have met many wonderful people and seen beautiful places. We saw Wynton Marsalis and his orchestra perform at the opening festival of Jazz at Lincoln Center; we drove an old Cadillac and were towed away when it broke down; we encountered a big black bear on a dark deserted road and lived to tell.
But I was asked to write about my teaching experiences. Before I start giving impressions and passing judgments, here are the facts: I was here as a visiting professor, partaking in an exchange between Rutgers and Utrecht University (The Netherlands). The exchange is still young, in fact my arrival here marked its very beginning, but we’re hoping this will grow into something beautiful and lasting. Plans for a summer course in Utrecht this summer are in a near-definitive phase, and hopefully Rutgers professors will one day cross the ocean to spend a semester over there.
The course I taught was on Dutch seventeenth-century painting. The class counted about 60 students, with 3 graduate students sitting in and doing different assignments. On Tuesdays I gave lectures, and on Thursdays we talked about readings, always in the same room at the Zimmerli Museum, except for a few weeks when our classroom was hijacked by the Holiday Bazaar, and we had to move a few doors down the hall.
I immediately liked the College Avenue Campus with its variety of little buildings, each housing its own little institution, all part of the huge organism this university is, yet projecting their own atmosphere. Voorhees Hall, with its own museum and library attached, soon became a place where I felt at home. For all the talk about American individualism, it felt much more like a community than any of the art historical institutes in Holland (there are six, and I have spent extended periods of time at four of them).
Something else that struck me was the sheer number of students living on campus. I guess they, too, really must have a feeling of belonging to this place. In Utrecht and most other Dutch universities, most student housing is not on university territory, and University buildings themselves are usually scattered around the city. We lack sports facilities like the Werblin Recreation Center, where one can swim across the man-size RUTGERS letters on the floor of the pool. Of course, my outlook may be rosy because I’m only a passer-by, but these circumstances did contribute to my well-being and made me feel good about teaching here. Being a visitor has many pleasant sides, anyhow – a visitor can be ignorant about almost everything and be forgiven, and the daily chores of a regular job are blissfully absent.
During the first few classes, the students struck me as not so different. Nice, young, intelligent people with all kinds of priorities. It took some a little time to get used to me, and it took me some time to get things moving, which, again, is not much different from how it works back home. What I did not expect were the reactions to the material itself. Although in hindsight it seems logical, it came as something of a surprise to me that the artists that I like to talk about – Hals, Rembrandt, Steen, Vermeer and so many others, who are more or less taken for granted in Holland, have an almost exotic ring to them over here. It sometimes made me feel like I had come to bring special and valuable gifts. Still, particularly here in New Brunswick, with New York and Philadelphia around the corner, so many Dutch paintings are readily accessible. One of the great things about this course was that I was able to make students aware of the fact that Dutch Art has also become a part of American heritage. Even in the small museum at Princeton, where we went on a field trip on a windy Sunday afternoon, we found that the Dutch paintings were rather impressive, and the way they were presented was exemplary. I could not name any other place in the world where the importance and essence of Haarlem and Utrecht mannerism is made so clear in just one room. I don’t consider myself much of a patriot, but I can’t deny that it made me feel proud.
On the whole, teaching and living here has been an enormously enriching experience for me and I surely hope the relationship between Rutgers and Utrecht will flourish, as I trust it will. But even if that shouldn’t work out, it is good to know that there is a place in New Jersey where I have lived for some time, and where I’ll hope to come back now and then.
Xander van Eck
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 Department of Art History
Voorhees Hall
71 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel: 732-932-7041
Fax: 732-932-1261
Catherine Puglisi, Chairperson
Erik Thunø , Undergraduate Director
Susan Sidlauskas, Graduate Program Director
Cathy Pizzi, Department Administrator
Geralyn Colvil, Student Coordinator
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