Rijksmuseum

Why it is worth the walk

The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands and the largest art museum in the country. It stands on Museumplein, in Amsterdam South. The collection runs from the year 1200 to 2000. About 8,000 objects are on show at any time, out of around a million.

Most people come for the seventeenth century. There are more than 2,000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age here, by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Jacob van Ruisdael and Vermeer. The museum owns 22 paintings by Rembrandt. His Night Watch and Vermeer's Milkmaid are the two names you will hear in the queue.

The building is part of the visit, so look up as well as at the walls. It has more than 80 rooms. Do not try to see them all. Pick a few and stay with them.

A museum that moved house

The Rijksmuseum did not start as a royal collection. The government decided to found it on 19 November 1798. It opened on 31 May 1800 in the Huis ten Bosch palace near The Hague, with around 200 paintings and historic objects from the stadholders' collections. There was no Rembrandt, Hals or Vermeer yet.

In 1808 Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, moved the museum to Amsterdam. It opened in the Royal Palace on the Dam in 1809, and paintings owned by the city, The Night Watch among them, joined the collection. In 1817 it moved again, to the Trippenhuis. That building turned out to be unsuitable.

The building you see today was designed by Pierre Cuypers and opened on 13 July 1885. He mixed Gothic and Renaissance elements. Inside and out it is decorated with references to Dutch art history: sculpture, tile panels, painted walls and stained glass.

Then came a long closure. The main building shut in 2003 for a renovation that was meant to take five years and took almost ten. It cost 375 million euros. Queen Beatrix reopened it on 13 April 2013. All that time the Night Watch and other seventeenth-century masterpieces stayed on show in the south wing, the Philips Wing.

What to look for

Start with the building. The central axis is a tunnel, with the entrances at ground level. Above it, on the first floor, runs the Gallery of Honour. It leads you straight to the Night Watch Room at the far end, where Rembrandt's huge canvas hangs. Look at the painted and tiled decoration on the walls and ceilings. Most of the colourful wall painting was covered over between the 1920s and 1950s, and much of it was brought back in the renovation.

The Night Watch is the big stop. The Milkmaid is small by comparison, so take your time with it. Then look for the odder things. The collection includes the royal crest from the stern of the English ship HMS Royal Charles, captured in the Raid on the Medway. It also holds the Hartog plate and an FK35 Bantam biplane. The small Asian collection is shown in its own pavilion, which opened in 2013.

The south wing was built in 1890 from fragments of demolished buildings. It works as a short lesson in Dutch architecture. A sculpture garden with works by Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Louise Bourgeois has also been announced, in the park next to the museum. The plan is for it to open in 2026.

If Rembrandt gets under your skin, the Rembrandt House Museum shows where he lived and painted for twenty years. It is about twenty minutes on foot. DiscoverAround also has two walks and a city quest on him and his neighbour Van Gogh, starting right here.