Posts · Spring 2026

Notes from a slow afternoon at the Rijksmuseum.

This is a small, unaffiliated blog. I write about a single museum in Amsterdam — the works that hold me longest, the building that holds them, and the centuries that built up around both.

If you visit the Rijksmuseum only once in your life, you will leave with the impression of a building too big to finish in a single afternoon, and that impression is correct. There are some two hundred rooms, eight thousand objects in permanent display, and roughly eight centuries of Dutch material life on the walls. What follows are three small entries from my notebook — one painting, one collection, and one piece of architecture — each meant as a starting point rather than a tour.

These posts are not affiliated with the museum. They are written for visitors who like to read about a place before walking into it, and for armchair travellers who may never walk into it at all. I have linked the museum's own pages where they can do better than I can.

Featured entries

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  Painting

  A second look at The Night Watch

  Rembrandt's largest canvas is not a night scene at all. Two centuries of varnish made it one. Notes on what has been recovered, and what has not.

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  Collection

  A short walk through eight centuries

  Vermeer, Hals, the Asian Pavilion, the dolls' houses on the top floor. What the permanent collection is actually shaped like, room by room.

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  Architecture

  Cuypers, and the long renovation

  The building is a museum object in its own right. Pierre Cuypers designed it in 1885. A decade of restoration finished in 2013. Both stories are worth knowing.