Rijksmuseum — museum
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Rijksmuseum

  • 2 min read
  • 52.360° N 4.885° E

Interesting facts

  • The national collection began so modestly that it fitted into five rooms of Huis ten Bosch palace, and at first owned no Rembrandt, Hals or Vermeer.
  • The Hartog Plate, a pewter dish a Dutch captain nailed to a post in Western Australia in 1616, is the oldest surviving artefact of European exploration there.
  • 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.
  • In April 1942 much of the collection was hidden in a purpose-built vault deep in the tunnels of the Sint-Pietersberg hill near Maastricht.
  • Cuypers's entry came only second in the first design contest of 1863, when no submission was judged good enough; he won the second contest in 1876.
  • The 224 paintings bequeathed by the banker Adriaan van der Hoop in 1854 nearly went abroad until private citizens raised money for the inheritance tax.
  • Its 2023 Vermeer exhibition gathered 28 of the 37 known works by the painter, the largest ever, and drew a record 650,000 visitors.
  • For the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death in 2019, all its Rembrandts were shown together for the first time: 22 paintings, 60 drawings and over 300 prints.
  • The renovation that ended in 2013 cost about €375 million, and in 2015 the museum was named European Museum of the Year.
  • The museum holds more than 2,000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, and its research library is the largest public art-history library in the Netherlands.

Why it is worth it

The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands and the place to understand the Dutch Golden Age in one visit. It was founded in The Hague in 1798, moved to Amsterdam in 1808 on the orders of Louis Bonaparte, and spent decades in borrowed rooms before Pierre Cuypers won a competition for a new building. His museum, which opened in 1885 on what is now the Museumplein, mixes Gothic and Renaissance forms and is decorated inside and out with references to Dutch art history. A tunnel runs straight through the middle of the building; it is still used by cyclists.

The route most visitors take leads up to the Gallery of Honour, which ends in the room built for Rembrandt's The Night Watch of 1642, a militia portrait of enormous size and energy. Along the way hang Vermeer's The Milkmaid, Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride and his Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, and works by Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael. Only around 8,000 of the museum's million objects are on show, and the displays mix paintings with objects of history and applied art, so the Golden Age appears as a society rather than a row of canvases. Look out for oddities such as the carved stern crest of HMS Royal Charles, taken by the Dutch in the raid on the Medway, and the Fokker-built Bantam biplane.

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.

Getting there

The Rijksmuseum stands at Museumstraat 1 on the Museumplein in Amsterdam, about 1.6 km from the city centre and next to the Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw. Tram 2 and several bus lines stop nearby. The nearest airport is Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS), about 10 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in North Holland 9The Most Beautiful Places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands 25The Most Remarkable Museums in the Kingdom of the Netherlands 7The Most Beautiful Buildings in the Kingdom of the Netherlands 10The Most Remarkable 19th-Century Museums 12The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings 28The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history, located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Royal Concertgebouw.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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