Rijksmuseum

The Batavian Republic was proclaimed in 1795; the last stadtholder had fled and his family's art collection was confiscated, the greater part of it shipped to Paris by the French. Gogel, the republic's agent for finance, argued that a national museum on the French model of the Louvre would serve the national interest, and on 19 November 1798 the government decided to found one. The Nationale Kunst-Galerij opened on 31 May 1800 in the confiscated Huis ten Bosch near The Hague, showing some 200 paintings and historic objects from the stadtholders' collections; its first director, the art dealer Cornelis Sebille Roos, made the earliest purchases with Gogel, among them Jan Asselijn's The Threatened Swan.

The gallery was renamed the Royal Museum after Louis Bonaparte took the throne of the Kingdom of Holland in 1806, and on his orders it moved to Amsterdam in 1808, opening the following year on the upper floor of the Royal Palace on the Dam, where the city's own paintings, Rembrandt's The Night Watch among them, joined the collection.

In 1817 the collection moved to the seventeenth-century Trippenhuis, which proved unsuitable as a museum. Works reclaimed from Paris after Napoleon's fall in 1815 came here too, while the historical objects went back to The Hague in 1820 and the paintings by living masters were sent in 1838 to Paviljoen Welgelegen in Haarlem. When the Amsterdam banker Adriaan van der Hoop left 224 paintings to the city in 1854, their power to draw visitors was doubted; the council made acceptance conditional on private subscribers finding 40,000 of the 50,000 guilders of death duty.

A design contest for a new building in 1863 produced nothing judged good enough, Pierre Cuypers coming second. He won a fresh contest in 1876 with a design combining gothic and renaissance elements, and construction began on 1 October 1876. A further contest chose the decorators: B. van Hove and Frantz Vermeylen for the sculpture, Georg Sturm for the tile panels and painting, W.F. Dixon for the stained glass.

The museum opened in its new building on 13 July 1885, taking in the collection of living masters from Haarlem and the Netherlands Museum of History and Art from The Hague. In 1890 a second building went up to the south-west, assembled from fragments of demolished buildings and known informally as the fragment building.

Part of the collection was moved to safety on the eve of the Second World War, and exhibitions of contemporary art filled the emptied rooms, among them Onze kunst van heden in 1939-40. In April 1942 much of the collection was placed in a vault built for the purpose in the underground passages of the Sint-Pietersberg near Maastricht; the space this freed was used for the Netherlands Railway Museum's collection in the east wing. During the occupation the museum staged German-friendly exhibitions, among them Westfaalsche-Nederrijnsche Kunst van Heden in August 1941 and Kunst der Front in January 1943.

The building has been a rijksmonument since 1970. In 1995 the museum was made independent: it passed from a state museum staffed by civil servants to the Het Rijksmuseum foundation, with the building and part of the collection remaining in the hands of the state.

The main building closed in 2003 for a renovation designed by the Spanish architects Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz; planned to run about five years, it took almost ten. The seventeenth-century masterpieces stayed on show in the Philips Wing, which drew 8.5 million visitors between 2003 and 2013. The work cost 375 million euros, and the restoration of the Cuypers decorations and Sturm's paintings was led by Anne van Grevenstein-Kruse. Reconstruction was completed on 16 July 2012, The Night Watch returned to the Night Watch Room in March 2013, and Queen Beatrix reopened the main building on 13 April 2013; the Philips Wing followed on 1 November 2014.

The museum recorded 2.2 million visitors in 2013 and 2.47 million in 2014, and was shut from 15 December 2020 to 4 June 2021 in the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021 it presented an exhibition on slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, on the more than 1.6 million people enslaved by Dutch slave traders, covering Suriname, Brazil and the Caribbean as well as South Africa and Asia; labels were added to 77 works in the permanent collection, objects long read as symbols of national wealth and power, setting out their links to slavery. Its 2023 Vermeer exhibition brought together 28 of the 37 known works and drew 650,000 visitors.