X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018

The Rijksmuseum first opened it’s doors in 1800 under the name «Nationale Kunstgalerij». At the time, it was housed in Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. The collection mainly comprised paintings and historical objects. In 1808, the museum moved to the new capital city of Amsterdam, where it was based in the Royal Palace on Dam Square.

After King Willem I’s accession to the throne, the paintings and national print collection were moved to the Trippenhuis, while the other objects were returned to The Hague. The current building was put into use in 1885. The Netherlands Museum for History and Art based in The Hague moved into the same premises, forming what would later become the departments of Dutch History and Sculpture & Applied Art.

On 19 November 1798, more than three years after the birth of the Batavian Republic, the government decided to honour a suggestion put forward by Isaac Gogel by following the French example of setting up a national museum. The museum initially housed the remains collections and a variety of objects originating from state institutions. When the Nationale Kunstgalerij first opened its doors on 31 May 1800, it had more than 200 paintings and historical objects on display. In the years that followed, Gogel and the first director, C.S. Roos, made countless acquisitions. Their first purchase, The Swan by Jan Asselijn, cost 100 Dutch guilders and is still one of the Rijksmuseum’s top pieces.

In 1808, the new King Louis Napoleon ordered the collections to be moved to Amsterdam, which was to be made the capital of the Kingdom of Holland. The works of art and objects were taken to the Royal Palace on Dam Square, the former city hall of Amsterdam, where they were united with the city’s foremost paintings, including the Night Watch by Rembrandt. In 1809, the Koninklijk Museum opened its doors on the top floor of the palace.

A few years after Willem I returned to the Netherlands as the new king in 1813, the «Rijks Museum» and the national print collection from The Hague relocated to the Trippenhuis. In 1838, a separate museum for modern 19th-century art was established in Paviljoen Welgelegen in Haarlem. Contrary to the days of Louis Napoleon, very few large acquisitions were made during this period.

The Trippenhuis proved unsuitable as a museum. Furthermore, many people thought it time to establish a dedicated national museum building in the Netherlands. Work on a new building did not commence until 1876, after many years of debate. The architect, Pierre Cuypers, had drawn up a historic design for the Rijksmuseum, which combined the Gothic and the Renaissance styles. The design was not generally well-received; people considered it too mediaeval and not Dutch enough. The official opening took place in 1885.

Nearly all the older paintings belonging to the City of Amsterdam were hung in the Rijksmuseum alongside paintings and prints from the Trippenhuis, including paintings such as Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride, which had been bequeathed to the city by the banker A. van der Hoop. The collection of 19th-century art from Haarlem was also added to the museum’s collection. Finally, a significant part of the Kabinet, which had by then been incorporated into the new Netherlands Museum for History and Art, was returned to Amsterdam.

Over the years, collections continued to grow and so the Rijksmuseum building underwent many changes. Rooms were added to the south-west side of the building between 1904 and 1916 (now the Philips wing) to house the collection of 19th-century paintings donated to the museum by Mr and Mrs Drucker-Fraser. In the 1950s and 1960s, the two original courtyards were covered and renovated to create more rooms.

In 1927, while Schmidt-Degener was Managing Director, the Netherlands Museum was split to form the departments of Dutch History and Sculpture & Applied Art. These departments were moved to separate parts of the building after 1945. The arrival of a collection donated by the Association of Friends of Asian Art in the 1950s resulted in the creation of the Asian Art department. The 1970s saw record numbers of visitors of almost one-and-a-half million per year, and the building gradually started to fall short of modern requirements.

The most recent renovation reinstated the original structure. The building work in the courtyards were removed. Paintings, applied art and history are no longer displayed in separate parts of the building, but form a single chronological circuit that tells the story of Dutch art and history.

The collection of the Rijksmuseum consists of 1 million objects and is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history from the years 1200 to 2000. Around 8000 objects are currently on display in the museum.

The collection contains more than 2,000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age by notable painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Rembrandt, and Rembrandt's pupils. The museum also has a small Asian collection which is on display in the Asian pavilion.

In 2012, the museum took the unusual step of making some 125,000 high-resolution images available for download via its Rijksstudio webplatform, with plans to add another 40,000 images per year until the entire collection of one million works is available, according to Taco Dibbits, director of collections.

The museum's exposition is a chronicle of the history of the Netherlands from 1100 to the present day in a wide variety of art subjects, beginning with elegant porcelain utensils, plaster busts, antique furniture and finishing with the works of famous artists.

The main sections of the museum:

art gallery (Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto, Carlo Crivelli, Gasparo Diciani, Alessandro Magnasco, Van Dyck, Rubens)

Department of sculptures;

decorative and applied arts (furniture, china of China, products of masters of the Middle Ages, jewelry);

art of China, Japan, India and the former colonies of Holland in Asia;

cabinet engravings;

library.

The basis of the art collection of the museum are paintings by Dutch artists - Rembrandt, Khals, Stein, Vermeer, but there are works by other artists - El Greco, Van Dyck, Veronese, Goya, Rubens, Tintoretto. The most famous exhibits of the museum are exhibited in three small rooms. In the gallery of glory on the second floor, tourists from all over the world flock to see the famous "Night Watch" by Rembrandt. The painting belongs to the city of Amsterdam, and in the Rijksmuseum is in temporary storage. By the way, its real name sounds less romantic – «Speech of the infantry company of Captain Franz Banning Kok». The collection of paintings by Rembrandt is quite large - 20 works - and second only to the Hermitage.

The museum shows samples of wooden and stone sculpture that adorns altars of churches, works of jewelers and gold embroidered vestments of the clergy. However, the greatest interest is represented by painting. Due to the prevalence of easel works, Dutch art can be shown in the museum more fully than the art of many other countries.

Among the first paintings bought in 1808 on the orders of Louis-Napoleon, there was one curious thing, brought into the inventory of the museum under the following title: «Jan van Eyck. Gothic temple with figures». Jan van Eyck, the great founder of the Dutch school of painting, the author of the Ghent Altar, was at that time perhaps the only Dutch artist of the fifteenth century, whose name was widely known to collectors; he was credited with anything that seemed old enough.

The museum presents the work of a major Dutch artist who worked in the last quarter of the 15th century and is known as the Master of Virgo inter Virgines. The conditional «name» of the anonym originates from the painting, still in 1801, was in the National Art Gallery and came from there to the Rijksmuseum. This is «Mary with the baby and the holy virgins».

Rijksmuseum has several works by the largest Dutch artist of the early 16th century - Luka Leidensky. Among them, «Last Judgment» is especially interesting. This strange genre scene, full of vague hints, is written in translucent liquid strokes of light, vague colors; and a smear and color convey the alarming mood characteristic of Luke's painting. The largest landscape painter of the first half of the 17th century was Jan van Goyen. In 1631 he wrote his «Landscape with a peasant hut».

Along with its main sections - old Dutch art and Dutch painting of the XVII century - the Rijksmuseum has a significant collection of Dutch paintings of the XVIII, XIX and XX centuries. Among the works of the 18th century, the works of Cornelis Trost, the author of portraits and genre scenes, often reproducing episodes from theatrical performances, are of interest. Trost writes a huge group portrait of the trustees of the shelter in Amsterdam (1729).

There are also works of foreign masters in the Rijksmuseum - Italians, Spaniards, Flemish. They are few, but some of them can’t go unnoticed: paired portraits of the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo and his father Francesco Giamberti, the works of Piero di Coime (1462-1521), The Crucifixion of El Greco, a series of portraits of Van Dyck, Portrait of Don Ramon Satue, Goya, etc. However, no matter how interesting they are, they are only a minor, lateral branch in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

At the Rijksmuseum, art and history take on new meaning for a broad-based, contemporary national and international audience. The Rijksmuseum keeps, manages, conserves, restores, researches, prepares, collects, publishes, and presents artistic and historical objects, both on its own premises and elsewhere.

References:

Great museums of the world (2012)

100 Great Museums of the World (2004)

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

http://minsk-amsterdam.com/rijksmuseum/

https://travel.tochka.net/8245-reyksmuzeum

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