Moments from Rijksmuseum

The current Cuypers-designed building opened in 1885, closed for a ten-year renovation in 2003, and reopened in 2013 to a building that finally worked the way it looked like it should: light-filled, logically arranged, and organized so that the collection builds toward a single room. That room is the Gallery of Honour, a long processional hall of Dutch Golden Age painting that culminates, deliberately, in Rembrandt's The Night Watch at the far end, the museum's biggest painting given the museum's biggest moment of arrival.

Since 2019, that painting has been getting a very public restoration: conservators work inside a glass chamber built around the canvas itself, so visitors watch the actual cleaning and analysis happen in real time rather than reading about it afterward, a project the museum calls Operation Night Watch. Go to the second floor first and walk the Gallery of Honour in order rather than beelining for the Rembrandt, the sequence of Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt's own earlier work is built to make the ending land harder. The museum's library and its Rijksmuseum Gardens, tucked around the building's exterior and free to enter, are worth ten minutes if you need a break from crowds.