Amsterdam for art lovers, arranged by where the art is

Three of the country’s great collections stand on one square, the rest are scattered along the canals and across the IJ. Here is how the art city fits together, and how a car turns four addresses into one unhurried day.

Amsterdam is an unusually concentrated art city. Its best-known collections sit within a few hundred metres of one another on a single lawn, its most atmospheric museums are houses that people actually lived and painted in, and the commercial galleries have stayed in two well-defined neighbourhoods for generations. That concentration is a gift and a trap. Everything looks walkable on a map, and then you discover that the walk from the Museumplein to the Rembrandthuis is half an hour into a headwind, and that you have used your best hour of the day on it.

Museumplein: three collections on one lawn

The Rijksmuseum anchors the square from the north, a Cuypers building of brick and stained glass with a cycle passage running straight through its middle — the only national museum in the world you can ride a bicycle under. Inside, the Gallery of Honour leads to the Nachtwacht, but the Dutch Golden Age rooms around it are the reason to allow more time than you planned: Vermeer’s milkmaid, Hals, Steen, and the ship models and Delftware that fill in the world the paintings came from.

A short walk across the grass, the Van Gogh Museum holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, hung roughly in the order he painted it, so the Dutch brown years give way to Paris and then to the light of Arles as you climb the floors. Next to it the Stedelijk Museum handles modern and contemporary art from a nineteenth-century building with a white composite extension grafted onto the front, known locally as the bathtub. And on the square’s eastern edge, in a small townhouse called Villa Alsberg, the Moco Museum shows modern and street art to an audience that often has not been in a museum all week.

Four institutions, one square, and no realistic chance of doing more than two of them properly in a day. Choose.

Houses, canals and the Amstel

The second layer of the art city is domestic. The Rembrandthuis on the Jodenbreestraat is the house Rembrandt bought at the height of his success and lost when it bankrupted him; it has been furnished back to the inventory taken when his possessions were sold, which makes it one of the few museums where you can see an artist’s working etching press in the room it stood in. Ten minutes south, on the Amstel, the long classical façade of the former Amstelhof holds the H’ART Museum — the institution that previously operated as Hermitage Amsterdam and now draws its exhibitions from several international collections rather than one.

For photography, Foam sits in a canal house on the Keizersgracht and changes its exhibitions often enough that regulars go without checking what is on. Between them, these three are the counterweight to the Museumplein: smaller rooms, fewer people, and buildings that are part of the subject.

Where the art is for sale

Two neighbourhoods carry the trade, and they have quite different characters. The Spiegelkwartier runs along the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat and the Spiegelgracht, from the back of the Rijksmuseum up towards the Herengracht: a dense row of dealers in old masters, antiquities, Asian art, silver and furniture, in shopfronts that have not changed much in a century. It is the part of Amsterdam where window-shopping is genuinely rewarding, and the dealers are used to visitors who are looking rather than buying.

The Jordaan is the contemporary side. Galleries cluster around the Elandsgracht, the Hazenstraat and the Laurierstraat, mixed in among the cafés and the hofjes, and they tend to open and close their shows on the same weekends — worth knowing, because that is when the doors are open late and the streets are busy with people going from one to the next.

Once a year the trade gathers indoors at PAN Amsterdam, the art and antiques fair held at RAI Amsterdam in the south of the city, where dealers from across the country and beyond show together under one roof. It is the easiest way to see a great deal of the Dutch market in an afternoon, and the RAI is the one address in this guide where arriving by car is straightforward rather than clever. We run cars to it from hotels and from Schiphol — see the PAN Amsterdam page.

Across the IJ

Amsterdam Noord has become the city’s space for art that needs room. The Eye Filmmuseum stands on the northern bank at Overhoeks, a white angular building visible from the water, with cinemas, a film collection and exhibitions on the moving image. Further west along the waterfront, the NDSM wharf — a former shipyard — holds STRAAT, a hangar-sized museum of street art and graffiti on canvases the size of shipping containers. Nxt Museum, also in Noord, shows digital and sensory installations in a converted industrial hall.

The ferries behind Centraal cross to Noord free of charge and are part of the fun. They are also the reason many visitors never go: with a hotel in the centre and a museum on each side of the water, the logistics defeat the intention. A car uses the IJtunnel and makes Noord a fifteen-minute extension of the day rather than a separate expedition.

One day, by car

The shape that works best, refined over a lot of Tuesdays:

1. Start at the Museumplein at opening. One large museum, properly — the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh, not both.
2. Walk the three minutes to the Stedelijk or the Moco if you still have appetite, or straight to lunch in the Oud-Zuid streets behind the square.
3. Be collected and driven to the Spiegelkwartier. Walk it end to end; it takes as long as you let it.
4. Continue to the Rembrandthuis or the H’ART Museum on the Amstel for the afternoon, depending on whether you want a house or an exhibition.
5. If there is light left, cross the IJtunnel to Eye or STRAAT and end the day looking back at the city from the north bank.

The car matters in the gaps rather than the destinations. Central Amsterdam has almost no kerbside parking worth having, the canal streets are one-way and often blocked by a delivery, and the museum quarter fills up by mid-morning. A chauffeur drops you at the door, takes the car away and brings it back when you message — which is the whole point of a chauffeur in Amsterdam on a day built out of four addresses.

Practical notes from the front seat

• Book timed entry in advance for the big museums. It is the one thing a car cannot solve for you.
• The Museumplein has a car park underneath it, but the drop-off points on the Hobbemastraat and the Paulus Potterstraat are faster.
• Rain is an argument for the galleries, not against them — the Spiegelkwartier is a row of doorways and the Jordaan is a short dash between them.
• Gallery openings in the Jordaan tend to fall on the same evenings; if you are in town for a weekend, ask a gallery which one.
• If you are carrying a purchase home, tell us at booking. A framed work travels flat in a Van Class, not on someone’s knees.

Amsterdam rewards visitors who accept that they cannot see it all. Pick two buildings and one street, give each of them more time than the guidebook suggests, and let someone else worry about the bridges.

Questions, answered

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