"
- One must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Machiavelli Niccolo
Visit Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
If you love Amsterdam and you have in your mind to visit this beautiful city so you must surely visit Rijksmuseum and get the idea about the history of Amsterdam.
The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw.
The Rijksmuseum is one of the world’s most famous museums, housing more than 8,000 works of art inside one of the Netherlands’ grandest buildings
What does it contain?
The great highlights are the works from the Golden Age of Dutch art from around 1620 to 1680, and the collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Steen and de Hooch is rivalled only by the Mauritshuis in The Hague (which is currently closed for restoration). The other great age of Flemish art – the 14th to 16th centuries – is not so well represented, though there are beautiful works in those galleries.
The collection is not limited to paintings, however. It is the equivalent of our National Gallery and the V&A being combined into a single display. Most of the paintings have been set in the context of other arts and crafts – from luxury furniture with brilliant trompe l’oeil inlays, to Delftware and porcelain, three extraordinary 17th-century dolls’ houses (for adults, not children), and even the finds from a Dutch ship which was stranded on a Russian island in 1596, including the crew’s leather shoes, tools, wooden buckets and musical instruments. It’s rather a shame, perhaps, that the most famous paintings have been removed from this context into their own “Gallery of Honour” – especially as so many of them depict the interiors evoked in the adjacent galleries.