Rijksmuseum
The Netherlands’ national museum, home to Rembrandt, Vermeer and 800 years of Dutch history.
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands, dedicated to Dutch art and history. The institution was founded in 1798 and moved several times before settling in Amsterdam, where it now occupies a monumental building on Museumplein. Its collection numbers around a million objects, of which several thousand are on display, spanning the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.
The current building, designed by Pierre Cuypers, opened in 1885. Cuypers blended Gothic and Renaissance influences into a richly decorated structure that doubles as a gateway to the city: a passage runs straight through its centre, used by pedestrians and cyclists. After a restoration and redesign lasting about a decade, led by the Spanish firm Cruz y Ortiz, the main building reopened in 2013 with two glass-covered courtyards serving as a spacious entrance hall.
Visitors come above all for the Dutch Golden Age paintings, gathered along the Gallery of Honour on the first floor and culminating in Rembrandt's Night Watch. Beyond the paintings, the museum holds prints, drawings, decorative arts, ship models and historical objects, and it houses the largest public art-history research library in the country. The surrounding gardens host free outdoor sculpture exhibitions each summer.
Highlights
- Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642)
- Vermeer's The Milkmaid and other Golden Age masterpieces
- Gallery of Honour lined with Dutch 17th-century paintings
- Cuypers Library, the Netherlands' largest art-history research library
- Free sculpture exhibitions in the Rijksmuseum Gardens
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