Go: exhibition about cheese

Do you also always get an acute craving when you see actors eating in your favorite series? And can you also not scroll past a food photo on Instagram without immediately wanting to eat it yourself? Then you’d better not go to the Stadsmuseum in the cheese city of Woerden, where an entire exhibition is devoted to cheese in art.

Woerden is a true cheese city. There is a cheese warehouse, and stones in the façades commemorate the city’s cheese-making history. The exhibition Unrestricted Shelf Life at the Stadsmuseum explores 400 years of cheese in art and is an ode to Woerden’s cheese culture.

No cheese fondue

You’ll see masterpieces by seventeenth-century artists such as Gabriël Metsu and Pieter Claesz, from a time when Dutch cheese was not yet cut into neat slices with a cheese slicer and served on a thin slice of bread. Those masterpieces also feature very little cheese fondue, cheeseburgers or cheese soufflés, by the way.

Large chunks of cheese represented Dutch prosperity

The still lifes from the Golden Age clearly show how important cheese was in our country at the time. Large chunks of crumbly aged cheese represented Dutch prosperity. They were therefore displayed as precious objects on beautiful porcelain, surrounded by plenty of fruit, oysters and other edible treats. An abundance that we nowadays rarely encounter around cheese anymore. Dick Bruna’s simple, sleek block of cheese, which is also featured in the exhibition, is perhaps the best example of this.

Cheese cravings

So make sure you’re well prepared when you enter the Woerden Stadsmuseum. Bringing a few chunks to eat out of hand in a ziplock bag, for example, isn’t a bad idea. Because getting hungry is inevitable. Fortunately, there’s that cheese warehouse, where you can satisfy your cravings afterwards. You can find more information about the cheese exhibition, which is on display until 11 March 2018, here.