OUr
museumkwartier
Area 3
There are a number of things you cannot get round in Amsterdam. Culture enthusiasts cannot go home before they have admired a number of masterpieces in Holland’s most important museums with their own eyes. Where to begin? Rijksmuseum (National Museum) In this impressive monumental building dating from 1885 you will find the famous masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish painters from the fifteenth up to and including the nineteenth century. Here you will also find Rembrandt’s world-famous Night Watch (1650). Other masters to be found here are: Jan Steen, Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer. After a long renovation project the Rijksmuseum has been open again completely since April. Van Gogh Museum When you walk through this museum you clearly see how this painter developed. As sombre as the paintings are that he made in the Netherlands, so colourful and vivid are the works that he made on French soil. You will also find works of contemporaries like Monet and Gauguin in the museum. Stedelijk Museum (Municipal Museum) The Stedelijk Museum, established in 1874, has a large collection of classical, modern and contemporary art. The museum owns about 90.000 objects from practically all important 20th and 21st century schools.
Tips! • If you don’t like waiting, you just order your Museum tickets online. • During the concert season (mid-September to the end of June) a free lunch concert is given in the Concertgebouw on Wednesdays: between 12.00 and 12.30 hours. • High Society shopping: parallel to Museumplein you will find the most stylish and most expensive shopping street of the Netherlands: P.C. Hooftstraat. • Diamond lovers visit the Diamond Museum Amsterdam (Paulus Potterstraat, opposite Museumplein))
18
Concertgebouw (Concert building) In 1888 the first concert took place in this famous Concert building. The acoustics in the building are extraordinary. In 2013 the Concertgebouw is celebrating its 125th anniversary. Every month of the Jubilee year a different period from the history of the Concertgebouw are central. Browsing around in antique shops Together with the adjacent Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, Spiegelgracht (opposite the Rijksmuseum) makes up the heart of the Spiegelkwartier; an area with many antique shops and galleries.