Rijksmuseum

Museum · Museum QuarterAmsterdam, Netherlands

The Rijksmuseum holds the national collection, and everything in it is arranged around one room: the Gallery of Honour, which narrows toward Rembrandt's Night Watch the way a nave narrows toward an altar. Around it hang Vermeer's Milkmaid, Frans Hals's laughing sitters, and the ship models, silverware and Delft blue that came out of the same century of trade. Pierre Cuypers built the place in 1885 in brick and stained glass, closer to a cathedral than a gallery, and it reopened in 2013 after a rebuild that took ten years rather than the five it was given. The detail people remember is at ground level. The city insisted that an existing public route through the site stay open, so Cuypers had to run a passage straight through the building, and cyclists still ride through it today. The museum tried to close it again during the recent rebuild and was refused. Upstairs the crowd behaves predictably: dense in the Gallery of Honour, thin everywhere else. The eighteenth-century rooms, the ship models and the garden are usually almost empty while two hundred people stand in front of one painting.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The Night Watch is not a night scene — it darkened under varnish over three centuries. It was also cut down in 1715 to fit a wall, which is why the composition sits oddly off-centre.
There is a library inside — Cuypers's reading room, the oldest and largest art-history library in the country, sits off the route to the Night Watch and is looked into rather than walked through.
The garden is nearly always empty — formal hedges, fountains and salvaged fragments of demolished Dutch buildings, in the shadow of the queue at the front door.

Things to do

1
Give the Night Watch twenty minutes
Most people photograph it and move on inside ninety seconds. Stand to one side of the glass restoration chamber and give it the time instead: the light falls on two figures and leaves more than thirty in shadow, half the militia are turning as if interrupted, and the whole thing is a group portrait that refused to sit still.
2
Go looking for the dolls' house
On an upper floor is a cabinet house made for a merchant's wife, fitted out by the same craftsmen who furnished real houses and costing about as much as one. Every miniature is the correct material — real porcelain, real silver, woven linen the size of a stamp.
3
Ride through the passage
The tunnel under the building is open, echoing and full of cyclists and a busker or two. Go through it once on foot from the Museumplein side and out into the old city, and you have used the museum the way the city insisted it be usable.