[idlewords]

I find it helpful when visiting art museums to do a lot of triage. I only have a certain number of paintings "in me" before burnout sets in, so I make sure to only stop and look at stuff that I really feel drawn to. This has made visiting museums vastly more pleasurable than it used to be, when I would dutifully look at six rooms of Egyptian antiquities or Byzantine icons and find I had nothing in the tank when I got to the stuff that had attracted me to the museum in the first place.

That said, the art museums in Holland tend to be terrific about limiting what they display. It's not like the Louvre, where you wander for miles through rooms of mind-numbing portraiture. Dutch museums, especially the smaller ones, have a handful of masterpieces and then a big cafe where you can eat apple cake and recharge for a second pass.

If you can manage it, it helps not to read any text, either. It's a non-verbal medium, and words can get in the way.