Main Collection
Explore over 800,000 works from the Rijksmuseum — Dutch Golden Age painting, prints, drawings, photography, decorative arts, Asian ceramics, and historical artifacts spanning eight centuries.
The Dutch Golden Age: painting the visible world.
n the seventeenth century, the newly sovereign Dutch Republic emerged as a maritime trade powerhouse, generating unprecedented middle-class wealth and a flourishing civilian art market. Eschewing the Catholic altarpieces and royal portraits dominant elsewhere in Europe, Dutch artists focused on empirical reality: domestic interiors, marine trade, scientific anatomy, and local civic society.
The collection centers on this secular turn: Rembrandt’s dynamic group portraiture and innovative etchings, Vermeer’s studies of domestic light, Frans Hals’s rapid brushwork, and landscape painters who gave two-thirds of the canvas to dramatic North Sea skies. The galleries also chart the global consequences of this era, documenting the colonial trade networks that funded this artistic output.
