Free Melanie Martin Goes Dutch by Carol Weston

She said she thought the painting was “haunting.”
    Haunting? Pleeeease!
    Next Mom showed us this other masterpiece of these guys who ran a clothing business. I said, “What's so great about six funny-looking men with funny-looking white collars and funny-looking black hats?”
    Cecily said to look at them looking at us. “It is hard to turn away from them, isn't it, Miranda? They seem so real, I half expect them to start talking to us.”
    I almost said, “If they start talking, maybe they'll tell you to stop talking.” (I didn't say it, though. I just thought it really loudly.)
    Finally, Mom took us to see the most famous masterpiece of all, this giant painting called
The Night Watch
. Mom said a bunch of soldiers hired Rembrandt to paint them, but instead of doing a group portrait with everyone all the same size, he painted an action painting with some soldiers big and up front, and others small and in the background. “Unfortunately,” Mom said, “the soldiers did not like it at all.”
    “Me neither,” I said. “And it's too big.”
    Mom looked so exasperated that I almost felt badfor her. It was like she couldn't figure out where she'd gone wrong raising me.
    Cecily loved the painting. “Check out the man's hand!” she said. “The light on his palm and his fingers makes his hand stick out like it's 3-D. It's like he wants to shake
our
hands!”
    “Exactly,” Mom said. It was a miracle she didn't add, “Melanie, why can't you appreciate Rembrandt like Cecily? And doesn't she look
lovely
in royal blue?”
    Well, I looked around and I did appreciate some of the other paintings, like
The Holy Family at Night and The Jewish Bride
. I was even about to say so, but just then Matt came running over. He said that he and Dad saw a cool painting of children teaching a cat to dance (“Jan Steen,” Dad said) and another of bundled-up skaters (“Avercamp,” Dad said), but his favorite was of this guy's chopped-off bloody head served up on a tray. (Gross!)
    “This guy,” Dad explained, “was John the Baptist.” Mom smiled. She loves when Matt and I pay attention to art—even if it's only because a scene is bloody or a statue is naked.
    She led us to a small room that had paintings by Jan Vermeer in it. While Mom dug out paper and colored pencils from her backpack, she told us that Vermeer painted in the 1600s and died when he was 43. “He painted really well but also really slowly,” she said. “There are fewer than three dozen of his paintings still around.”
    “How many is that?” Matt asked.
    “Thirty-six,” Cecily said oh so helpfully.
    Mom told us to sit on the floor and pick a painting and draw it.
    Well, two were of ladies reading letters, but I didn't choose them.
    Matt picked
The Little Street
, which shows a brick building on a quiet street with ladies sewing and scrubbing. I chose
The Milkmaid
, which is a lady calmly pouring milk into a bowl next to a bread basket while light streams in from the side. I hoped that looking at that calm lady might calm me. And I figured that would be a good thing.
    Cecily chose
The Milkmaid
too.
    “Great choice,” Mom said. “Look how serene she is.”

    “What I don't get,” Dad said, “is how Vermeer could paint such inner peace when he had eleven mouths to feed.”
    (What I don't get is how my father can refer to children as “mouths to feed”!)
    “I know,” Mom answered. “Poor man, he always had money troubles. He died in debt.”
    “I thought he was famous,” Matt said.
    “He became famous long
after
his death,” Mom explained. “In fact, he's never been more famous than he is right now. We live in a busy, stressful time, so maybe we
need
his quiet scenes.”
    Then she told us kids to stay put because she and Dad were going to go look at
The Night Watch
again. “We'll be back in five minutes,” Dad said.
    Five
minutes to look at
one
painting!
    Well, we started sketching away and trying to feel Vermeer's inner peace and everything,