Amsterdam's Best Museums

Our Local Expert Says:

Quirkiest Church

Description:

Although the Dutch tolerance policy (gedoogbeleid) is best known today as a policy allowing licensed shops to sell cannabis as long as they don't advertise that they are doing so, this tolerance policy is actually as old as the city itself and was for 200 years the means of survival for Amsterdam's outlawed Catholic community. Between the Protestant Reformation of 1578 and the Catholic Emancipation of 1799, Catholic worship was considered illegal but was tolerated in hidden churches around this city, as long as the building was not visibly a church from the outside. This museum was once the canal house of wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman, and his former bedroom, salon, and kitchen show how he and others like him lived during the seventeenth century. But, the centerpiece of the museum, commonly called "Our Dear Lord in the Attic," is the three-story, 150-seat Catholic church in its top floors. This church was the parish church for the Catholics of the City Centre for over 200 years and, as the main Catholic church during this time, was called St. Nicholas Church after the patron saint of Amsterdam. Visiting this museum gives a glimpse not only into the lives of Golden Age canal-dwelling... read more

Our Local Expert Says:

Best Photography Museum

Description:

FOAM is a modern arthouse, showcasing works by young talent and world-renowned artists. Visitors can marvel at the architectural design and tones of the museum, an excellent backdrop for photographic and multimedia displays. A library on the upper level contains books and material on photography, while the downstairs cafe greets museum-goers with hot coffee. Displays are rotated regularly; visit the website for information on exhibitions.

Description:

To view the greatest masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn, you must visit the Rijksmuseum, but in this circa-1606 house, you get a more intimate sense of Rembrandt -- it's a shrine to one of the greatest artists the world has ever known. Rembrandt bought this three-story, 10-room house in 1639 when he was Amsterdam's most fashionable portrait painter. In this house, his son Titus was born and his wife Saskia died. Due to his extravagant lifestyle, the artist was bankrupt when he left it in 1658 and moved with his son Titus and his mistress Hendrickje to a plain house (that no longer exists) on Rozengracht.

Not until 1906 was the building rescued from a succession of subsequent owners and restored as a museum. More recent restoration has returned the old house to the way it looked when Rembrandt lived and worked here, complete with a ground-floor kitchen and the maid's bedroom. Additional work in 2000 restored the artist's art-and-curiosities cabinet, his combined living room and bedroom, and the upstairs studio in which he created, among other famous works, The Night Watch.

The rooms are furnished with 17th-century objects and furniture that, as closely as possible, match the descriptions...

Description:

More than 200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), along with nearly every sketch, print, etching, and piece of correspondence the artist ever produced have been housed here since the museum opened in 1973. Van Gogh's sister-in-law and a namesake nephew presented the collection to Holland with the provision that the canvases not leave Vincent's native land. To the further consternation of van Gogh admirers and scholars elsewhere in the world, all but a few of the artist's works that aren't in this museum hang at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park near Arnhem.

You can trace this great artist's artistic and psychological development -- or decline -- by viewing the paintings displayed in chronological order according to the seven distinct periods and places of residence that defined his short career. (He painted for only 10 years and was on the threshold of success when he committed suicide at age 37). Only one of van Gogh's paintings sold during his lifetime (Theo sold it), but he did give others out to pay for food, drink, and lodgings -- some perhaps went for little more than a song.

The Potato Eaters (1885) was van Gogh's anxious and sensitive first masterpiece....

Our Local Expert Says:

The most extensive collection of Dutch artists in Amsterdam.

Description:

Architect Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers (1827-1921), the grandfather of modern Dutch architecture, designed the brick museum in a monumental Dutch neo-Renaissance, gabled style. Cuypers, a Catholic, slipped in more than a dab of neo-Gothic, too, causing the country's thoroughly Protestant King William III to scorn "that cathedral." The building opened in 1885 to a less-than-enthusiastic public reception. Since then, much has been added to the building and the collection.

The Rijksmuseum contains the world's largest collection of paintings by the Dutch masters, including the most famous of all, a single work that all but defines the Golden Age. The painting is Rembrandt's The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, 1642, better known as The Night Watch . The scene it so dramatically depicts is surely alien to most of the people who flock to see it: gaily uniformed, but not exactly warrior-looking militiamen checking their weapons and accoutrements before moving out on patrol. Captain Cocq (once described as the stupidest man in the city, whose house on Singelgracht still stands), Lieutenant van Ruytenburch, the troopers, and observers (including...

Description:

This museum is located on the Hendrika Maria, a former commercial sailing ship built in 1914. On board, the visitor obtains information on the nature of this special lifestyle, living on a boat that never moves, which is so unique to Amsterdam. The deckhouse, where the shipper's family resided, is still in place, including the cupboard bed. The former cargo hold has now been converted into comfortable living space. Ship's models, photos and slides complete the tour. See website for photos, routes, visitor details and more.

Description:

In summer, you may have to wait an hour or more to get in, but you shouldn't miss seeing and experiencing this house. It's a typical Amsterdam canal house, with very steep interior stairs where eight people from three separate families lived together in silence for more than 2 years during World War II. The hiding place Otto Frank found for his family, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer kept them safe until, tragically, close to the end of the war, when it was raided by Nazi forces and its occupants were deported to concentration camps. It was in this house that Anne, whose ambition was to be a writer, kept her famous diary as a way to deal with both the boredom and her youthful array of thoughts, which had as much to do with personal relationships as with the war and the Nazi terror raging outside. Visiting the rooms in which she hid is a moving and eerily real experience.

During the war, the building was an office and warehouse, and its rooms are still as bare as they were when Anne's father returned, the only survivor of the eight onderduikers (divers, or hiders). Nothing has been changed, except that protective Plexiglas panels now protect the wall on which Anne pinned up photos...

Description:

Behind its faux-marble facade, this museum isn't as sleazy as you might expect, apart from one room covered with straight-up pornography. Otherwise, presentation tends toward the tongue-in-cheek, and the place seems to be fine with its half-million annual visitors. Exhibits include erotic prints and drawings, and trinkets like tobacco boxes decorated with naughty pictures. Teenage visitors seem to find the whole place vastly amusing, judging by the giggling fits at the showcases. Spare a thought for the models of early erotic photography -- slow film speeds in those days made for uncomfortably long posing times!