Colophon

About this notebook.

A small, unaffiliated blog about the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Written by a reader, not a curator. No newsletter, no shop, no advertising, no tickets.

Around the Rijks is a personal reader's notebook. It exists because I have spent more afternoons in the Rijksmuseum than I have honestly been able to explain to anyone, and because, after a while, you find that you have read a lot of small, useful, and surprising things about a single building, and that they are not collected anywhere in a form a stranger could read in fifteen minutes.

The posts are short on purpose. I write about one room, or one painting, or one piece of furniture at a time. I take photographs with a phone. I read the museum's own publications and the standard reference works, and I try to point readers toward whichever of those will serve them best. I do not have access to any back rooms.

What this site is not

It is not affiliated with the Rijksmuseum. It is not an alternative ticketing site. It does not sell tickets, audio guides, hotel bookings, restaurant reservations, transport, taxis, or merchandise of any kind. If you have arrived here looking to buy something, you have come to the wrong place. The official website of the Rijksmuseum is at rijksmuseum.nl — their tickets, opening hours, and accessibility information are kept current there, in eight languages.

It is also not a guidebook. It contains no maps and no floor plans, and no advice on what to do if you have only two hours in Amsterdam. There are several excellent guidebooks. Robert McGill's small Pocket Rijksmuseum from 2018 is one of the best, and it is sold by the museum's own shop. The free Rijksmuseum app contains better tour itineraries than I could write.

Editorial notes

• Images on the site are taken from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain or under Creative Commons licences. Each is captioned with its source.
• All quotations are attributed in the text. Where I quote the museum's own catalogue, I have used the most recent published edition (2024).
• I have used British English spellings throughout, because they are the spellings the museum's own English-language captions tend to prefer.
• Errors are mine. The Rijksmuseum is large; corrections are welcome through the form below.

Contact

Email is the only way to reach me. notes@aroundtherijks.example. Replies are usually slow, especially in the months when the upper floors of the museum are open longer.