On the building, the passage, and the particular quality of a museum visited at the correct hour
The Rijksmuseum opens at nine. By ten-thirty the first of the group tours is arriving at the Night Watch. Before ten, the building is navigable at a pace that the afternoon does not allow.
The Rijksmuseum opens at nine. By ten-thirty the first of the group tours is arriving at the Night Watch. Before ten, the building is navigable at a pace that the afternoon does not allow — rooms to yourself, the guards reading, the light in the galleries at the angle it will be for only an hour. This is the reason to arrive early: not to beat the crowd, which is a strategy, but to have the museum in the condition in which it is most itself — quiet, considered, and oriented around the works rather than the visitors.
Pierre Cuypers' 1885 building is a significant piece of architecture in its own right. The facade is Dutch neo-Gothic — red brick with white stone detailing, towers at the corners, the facade organised around a central passage that runs through the ground floor of the building. This passage is free: a cycle path connecting the Museumplein to the canal ring, running beneath the museum's main galleries. The passage ceiling is decorated with Delftware tiles; the gates at either end are wrought iron. It is one of the more unusual pieces of public space in Amsterdam.
The permanent collection is organised chronologically through the Dutch Golden Age, with the Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn (1642) as the culminating room. The Night Watch room was purpose-built to accommodate the painting, which is 3.63 by 4.37 metres — large enough that in most rooms it would dominate its environment. The Rijksmuseum's room is large enough that you can stand at a distance where the painting resolves into its intended viewing condition.
Vermeer's work in the collection — The Milkmaid, The Letter, Woman Reading a Letter — is more useful than the Night Watch for understanding what Dutch Golden Age painting was doing. The Night Watch is a group portrait working in the theatrical tradition; the Vermeers are a sustained investigation of interior light and the way it falls on cloth, skin, and ceramic. The milk in the Milkmaid's jug, pouring in a steady thread, has been correctly rendered for 360 years.
Leave before noon by the garden passage — the small courtyard on the north side of the building, accessible from the ground floor, with a café and the particular quality of a courtyard that is inside and outside simultaneously. The light in the courtyard in the late morning, when the sun has reached the right angle to clear the surrounding walls, is the museum's final room.