Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, devoted to art, craftsmanship and history. Its collection of Dutch Golden Age painting is the most celebrated in the country, bringing together works by nearly all the major Dutch masters from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Among them, Rembrandt stands out with a broad body of work, alongside Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Jacob Ruysdael, as well as figures such as Jan Havicksz Steen. Among the best-known paintings in the museum are The Milkmaid, The Little Street, Woman Reading a Letter and The Love Letter by Vermeer; The Merry Drinker by Hals; The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild and Rembrandt's 1628 self-portrait by Rembrandt himself; and Winter Landscape with Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp. The collection also includes painting from other countries, Asian and Egyptian art, drawings, prints and twentieth-century design.

The museum was founded in 1800 on the initiative of the financier Alexander Gorel and first opened at the Huis ten Bosch palace near The Hague, displaying the collections of the Dutch stadtholders. In 1808 it was moved to Amsterdam by order of King Louis Napoleon. Since 1885 it has occupied its present building, designed by the architect Pierre Cuypers, which mixes Gothic and Renaissance elements and is richly decorated with references to Dutch art history. Between 2003 and 2013 it underwent a major renovation led by the Spanish architects Cruz and Ortiz, at a cost of 375 million euros, which kept almost the entire complex closed. It reopened in April 2013.