The Most Remarkable Museums in the Kingdom of the Netherlands
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable museums in the Kingdom of the Netherlands are Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House. The list covers 7 museums. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Dutch Republic of the 17th century was the first society where merchants, not only princes, bought paintings in quantity, and the result was a Golden Age of art that the Netherlands still holds at home. In the 20th century the same country produced De Stijl, so its museums range from Rembrandt's dark canvases to rooms made of primary colours and sliding walls.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in Pierre Cuypers' Gothic-Renaissance building of 1885, is home to Rembrandt's Night Watch and Vermeer's Milkmaid. The Mauritshuis in The Hague, a 17th-century house beside the Hofvijver, holds Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft. The Kröller-Müller Museum sits inside the Hoge Veluwe National Park, with one of the world's largest Van Gogh collections and a sculpture garden among the trees. In Utrecht, the Rietveld Schröder House of 1924 is itself the exhibit: a De Stijl home whose upper floor opens into one room by sliding partitions.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Van Gogh Museum | Museum | |
| 2 | Rijksmuseum | Museum | |
| 3 | Anne Frank House | Museum | |
| 4 | Rietveld Schröder House | Museum | ✓ |
| 5 | Kröller-Müller Museum | Museum | |
| 6 | Mauritshuis | Museum | |
| 7 | Eise Eisinga Planetarium | Museum | ✓ |
01 Van Gogh Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E
GoldenArtists · CC BY 4.0 Other rooms show the artists he learned from, argued with and influenced: Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, Monet and others, which puts the paintings in context. The oval wing by Kisho Kurokawa, reached through an underground passage, holds the major temporary exhibitions. Twice in its history the museum has been robbed: twenty paintings were taken in 1991 and found in an abandoned car within the hour, and two stolen in 2002 turned up in Italy in 2016.
02 Rijksmuseum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.2 km from Amsterdam52.360° N 4.885° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay A renovation led by the Spanish architects Cruz y Ortiz restored much of Cuypers's painted decoration and turning the two courtyards into bright covered atriums; a small Asian pavilion was added in the garden. The Philips Wing, built in 1890 from fragments of demolished buildings, holds temporary exhibitions. The museum also releases hundreds of thousands of images of its works free for reuse online, which makes it easy to study a painting before seeing it.
Did you know? The Night Watch joined the collection in 1809, when the museum moved into the Royal Palace on Dam Square together with Amsterdam's own paintings.
03 Anne Frank House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.3 km from Amsterdam52.375° N 4.884° E
Lệ Xuân · CC BY-SA 4.0 The house was nearly lost. In the 1950s a company bought the block with plans to demolish it, and a newspaper campaign and a protest on the day of demolition saved it. The Anne Frank Foundation was set up in 1957, and the museum opened on 3 May 1960. It now spans Prinsengracht 263 and 265 and a newer building on the corner of Westermarkt, close to the Westerkerk.
04 Rietveld Schröder House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.5 km from Utrecht52.085° N 5.148° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Joop Elsinga · CC0 It is now run by the Centraal Museum, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Visits are intimate by necessity: small groups move through a house of modest size, and the experience of watching the panels slide into new configurations is what stays with most people. The Centraal Museum in the city centre displays many of Rietveld's chairs.
Did you know? Schröder asked that every room have gas, water, electricity, space for a bed and a door to the outside, which later let her let ground-floor rooms to students.
05 Kröller-Müller Museum
Kröller Müller Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 14 km from Arnhem52.096° N 5.817° E
Ziko van Dijk · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the visit memorable is the combination: you arrive through a national park of sand drifts, heather and forest, often by bicycle, and then stand in front of Van Gogh's most famous canvases with almost no city noise around.
Did you know? Before choosing Van de Velde, the Kröller-Müllers commissioned museum designs from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Behrens and Hendrik Berlage.
06 Mauritshuis
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3 km from The Hague52.080° N 4.314° E
Image by AJEL from Pixabay The museum does not hide the uncomfortable side of its founder: its own interpretation explains the role John Maurice played in the slave trade in Dutch Brazil and how that wealth paid for the house. A renovation completed in 2014 by Hans van Heeswijk linked the old house through an underground passage to the neighbouring Sociëteit de Witte building, adding space for exhibitions without touching the historic rooms. During the Second World War the paintings were kept safe in a bunker and later in caves near Maastricht.
Did you know? Fabritius's Goldfinch may have been in his Delft workshop when the 1654 gunpowder explosion killed him; tiny dents in its paint could date from the blast.
07 Eise Eisinga Planetarium
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 17.5 km from Leeuwarden53.187° N 5.544° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
bertknot from scarborough, australia · CC BY-SA 2.0 The planetarium stands in the historic centre of Franeker, a small town in the Frisian countryside.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most remarkable museums in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- On our list, Van Gogh Museum ranks first, followed by Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House.
- Where can you see The Night Watch?
- Rembrandt's Night Watch, painted in 1642, hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in a gallery designed around it at the heart of the building.
- Why is the Rietveld Schröder House famous?
- Designed by Gerrit Rietveld with Truus Schröder in 1924, it is the most complete built expression of the De Stijl movement, with flat planes, primary colours and a flexible open plan. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.
- Which museum has Girl with a Pearl Earring?
- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring belongs to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which also owns his View of Delft and Carel Fabritius' The Goldfinch.
- How many museums are on this list in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- The list covers 7 museums.