Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam. The museum has on display 8,000 objects of art and history, from their total collection of 1 million objects from the years 1200–2000. The collection contains more than 2,000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age by notable painters such as Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Rembrandt, and Rembrandt's pupils. Probably the most well known pieces of art are The Milkmaid (c. 1658) painted by Johannes Vermeer and The Night Watch (1642) by Rembrandt.

The Rijksmuseum was founded in The Hague in 1800 and moved to Amsterdam in 1808, where it was first located in the Royal Palace and later in the Trippenhuis. The current main building was designed by Pierre Cuypers and first opened its doors in 1885. On 13 April 2013, after a ten-year renovation which cost € 375 million, the main building was reopened by Queen Beatrix. In 2013, it was the most visited museum in the Netherlands with a record number of 2.2 million visitors.

The museum has taken the unusual step of making some 125,000 high-resolution images available for download via its Rijks Studio software, with plans to add another 40,000 images per year until the entire collection of one million works is available, according to Taco Dibbits, director of collections.

References:

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User Reviews

Jin Aura (10 months ago)
Really cool museum that's a little oddly arranged. It's in a giant castle structure which makes it even cooler. They also have free lockers so be sure to use them as certain size water bottles are not permitted there amongst the art, rightfully so. Plenty of exhibits and better to get there early towards opening to avoid the rush. Being a tourist myself, I had plenty of room to check out stuff.

Jury Rodionov (10 months ago)
Very nice world class museum. From my personal experience he is of a same scale like Hermitage and Louvre. I loved the collections, especially from an early Medieval times. You can see how the art progressively changed over the centuries within a few hours of your visit. But I would strongly recommend to spend all day there in order to enjoy the history without rushing through a huge collection of art they have there. Check my pictures to get a better idea what to expect.

Mark Pabst (11 months ago)
They have audio tours both for your phone and an easy to use device (I got the device). Additionally they have docent led tours which I think is the best option since you can ask questions (I took this too.) The cost for the device and the human led tour is 5 euros each and well worth it. For a 'classic' museum I was surprise at how loud it is. Apparently the Dutch are very enthusiastic about their artists.

Martin J. (11 months ago)
Huge collection of a diverse range of different pieces of art. From furniture, over everyday objects, weapons and paintings from different epochs you can find many things of interest and easily spend 3-6 hours. The building does not allow to follow one stream to see everything but has some back and forth and a lot of stairs.

JAG (12 months ago)
Really interesting museum. Spectacular building and hall. Nice rooms and corridors, signals and directions are quite well shown. During my 2.5hrs visit, my estimation is that I saw 60-70% of it. A lot of variety of collections on time and type (paintings, weapons, sculptures, dolls' houses,...) really nice library close to night walk painting. First level museum in Europe.

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