Amsterdam, Netherlands
Rijksmuseum · RAYKS-mu-zay-um
The national museum of the Netherlands, in a red-brick palace of 1885 with a public road running through the middle of it. Inside are Rembrandt's Night Watch, four Vermeers, a doll's house that cost as much as a real one, and eight hundred years of a small country that once traded with half the world.
Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
The building looks like a cathedral, and that was the trouble. Its architect, Pierre Cuypers, was a Catholic who built churches. When it opened on 13 July 1885, many in this Protestant country thought it far too Catholic for a national museum.
Through its middle runs an arched passage, a public road for cyclists. During the rebuilding of 2003–2013 the architects wanted to close it for a new entrance. Amsterdam's cyclists fought them for years, and won. The bicycles still ring their way under the museum.
One ticket with a timed start covers the whole collection. The garden and the cyclists' passage are free.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Gallery of Honour and The Night Watch | Included |
| The Cuypers Library (seen from the gallery) | Included |
| The doll's houses | Included |
| Ship models and history rooms | Included |
| The Asian Pavilion | Included |
| The garden | Free |
| The cyclists' passage | Free, a public road |
Go up to the second floor and walk the long hall. The side bays hold the Golden Age, the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Republic was the richest trading nation on earth. At the far end hangs The Night Watch.
Rembrandt finished it in 1642 for the hall of a civic guard company. It is nearly four and a half metres wide. It is not a night scene. The name was given much later, when old varnish had turned it dark.
Since 2019 the painting has been studied and restored in a glass room, in front of visitors. If the glass room is there when you come, you may see someone at work on it.
Before you reach it, look in the bays on the left for a small picture of a maid pouring milk. Vermeer painted it about 1660. The bread on the table is made of tiny dots of light.
"The Night Watch is a night scene." It shows a company marching out in daylight. Cleaning in 1946–47 brought back much of the light.
"The big I amsterdam letters are in front of the museum." They were, from 2004. The city took them away in December 2018, saying they had become a symbol of mass tourism.
"The Van Gogh paintings are here." Almost all are at the Van Gogh Museum, a five-minute walk across the square. The Rijksmuseum has a self-portrait and a few others.
"It is only paintings." It holds about a million objects, including ship models, weapons, silver, Delft pottery, a Japanese temple's guardians, and the doll's house.
We searched Dutch and English sources for this list.
The museum is big. These eight stops take about two and a half hours. Start in the atrium, go to the top floor, and come down.
You enter from the passage into one of two courtyards. Cuypers left them open to the sky. Later they were filled with offices. The Spanish architects Cruz y Ortiz cleared them and roofed them in glass. Hanging from the roof are great square chandeliers.
The cyclists' road runs between the two courtyards. You can hear the bells through the glass.
Look at the outside before you go in. Cuypers covered it in tiles, statues and painted panels that tell the history of Dutch art. Artists' names are worked into the walls.
The style mixes Gothic and Dutch Renaissance. Protestant critics called it a monastery. Cuypers answered that a nation's art deserved a building as rich as a church.
The hall was built like the nave of a church, with The Night Watch where the altar would be. That was Cuypers' plan from the start, and after many moves it is where the painting hangs today.
In the bays: Frans Hals' laughing drinker, Vermeer's little street in Delft and his woman reading a letter in blue, and Rembrandt's Jewish Bride. Look at the man's hand resting on the woman's breast, and hers laid lightly over it. Nobody knows who the couple were.
The captain in black, Frans Banninck Cocq, gives the order to march. His lieutenant in pale yellow listens. Between them a girl in gold carries a chicken at her belt. The chicken's claws were the emblem of the company, the arquebusiers.
In 1715 the painting was moved to the town hall and cut down on all four sides to fit between two doors. Two men on the left were lost. In 2021 the museum hung printed reconstructions of the missing strips beside it for a time, made with help from a computer.
When war came in 1939 it was rolled up and moved from hiding place to hiding place. It spent the last years in a cave in the marl hills at Maastricht. The slot in this photograph was cut in a ceiling to get it back in.
It has been attacked three times: with a knife in 1911 and 1975, and with acid in 1990. Each time it was repaired.
On the second floor, a door off the hall opens onto a balcony above a four-storey library of iron and wood, with spiral stairs in the corners. It is the oldest and largest art history library in the Netherlands. You can look down into it from the visitors' gallery.
Petronella Oortman, the wife of a rich silk merchant, had this cabinet made between about 1686 and 1710. Every piece in it was made by craftsmen to scale: Chinese porcelain, a linen room, a peat loft, a nursery. It is said to have cost as much as a house on a canal.
The tiny porcelain in it came from China, like much of the real porcelain in Dutch houses. The Dutch East India Company shipped millions of pieces from Jingdezhen. Delft potters copied the blue and white, and their imitations became Delftware.
On the first floor is a great model of a warship of 1698, carved and gilded. The Republic's wealth came by sea. The same ships carried spices, slaves and soldiers. Since 2021 the museum has told that side too, with labels and an exhibition on slavery.
In 1624 the Dutch took the south-west of Taiwan and held it for thirty-eight years. In 1662 they surrendered Fort Zeelandia to Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong). The Golden Age you see upstairs and that story are one story.
A low stone building in the garden holds Asian art. The dancing Shiva from south India is about eight hundred years old. Two wooden Japanese temple guardians of the fourteenth century stand in the pavilion, fierce and twice the height of a man.
The garden is free and open to all. Cuypers filled it with fragments of old buildings pulled down across the country: gateways, columns, carved stones. He was a builder who mourned what others demolished.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1642 | The Night Watch is finished | The English Civil War begins |
| about 1660 | Vermeer paints The Milkmaid | Charles II returns to the English throne |
| about 1686 | The doll's house is begun | Newton's Principia, 1687 |
| 1808 | The collection comes to Amsterdam | Napoleon invades Spain |
| 1885 | The building opens | The first motor car, by Karl Benz |
| 1939–1945 | The Night Watch in hiding | The Second World War |
| 2013 | Reopened after ten years | Edward Snowden's leaks |
One line to remember: a cathedral of art, a road through the middle, and a captain who is not marching at night.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
King William III is said to have disliked the building so much that he called it "the archbishop's palace" and refused to set foot in it.
Source: A story told by Amsterdam guides and repeated in Dutch histories of the museum; we found no record from the king himself
Petronella Oortman is said to have spent on her doll's house as much as a real house on the canal, and her husband to have complained.
Source: The museum gives the cost as 20,000 to 30,000 guilders; the husband's complaint is later storytelling
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The museum's own Dutch ticket page and Amsterdam travel guides of 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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