MASTER CLASS

Puzzled by life's big questions? The great painters of 17th-century Holland can help. Benjamin Moser searches for answers in the country's best small museums.

- Benjamin Moser

MORE THAN 20 YEARS AGO, I fell in love. If he had been from Chicago, I would have moved to Chicago. But he was from Utrecht, so I moved to Utrecht. It seemed romantic to start a new life in the Netherlands—and it was. But it was also disorienting, and I found myself, to use a Dutch expression, in an upside-down world: in a new language, in a new culture, among people who, though they didn’t look much different from Americans, were the products of an entirely different history. I wanted to figure out who they were and who I might be in relation to them.

To add to the disorientation, I was also trying to figure out how to write. I wanted someone to tell me how, so I could crib their answers. But that’s not, alas, how it works. As I tried to get to know the country, I discovered quite a few people who seemed to be asking the same questions— about love and death and art and money, about how to see and how to be. Why do we make art? Who, and what, is an artist? How can art help us see ourselves, and how can it help us see others? How, to put it simply, are we to live?

The only problem was that these new friends had been dead for centuries—I was meeting them on the walls of the museums that dotted the country. As I got to know the artists of the era of Rembrandt and Vermeer, I marvelled at the range and richness that Holland produced during its Golden Age. Beyond the most famous names and the most fabulous museums—and you can’t skip the Rijksmuseum