Three museums, one week of Dutch painting, and a fourth stop most people skip.

Reopened in 2013 after a decade-long renovation, the Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands' national museum — eighty rooms of chronological Dutch art and history, built around one painting most visitors come specifically to see.

Founded

1800

Centerpiece

The Night Watch

Artist

Rembrandt, 1642

Rembrandt's The Night Watch is the museum's single biggest draw — a militia group portrait so large it has its own dedicated gallery, currently visible mid-restoration behind glass so visitors can watch conservators work on it in real time. Around it sits the rest of the Golden Age: Vermeer's quiet domestic interiors, Frans Hals's loose, confident portraits, and room after room of the still-life and landscape painting that made 17th-century Dutch art distinct from anywhere else in Europe.

The Rijksmuseum is enormous. Trying to see everything in one visit is how people end up remembering none of it — a focused two-to-three-hour route through the Gallery of Honour and the Golden Age rooms beats a rushed seven-hour marathon.

The artist

Only around 35 known paintings

Johannes Vermeer worked slowly and rarely, spent his whole life in Delft, and left behind a body of work small enough that a handful of scholars have spent careers arguing over which paintings are genuinely his.

Where to see one

The Mauritshuis, The Hague

This compact 17th-century townhouse-turned-museum holds Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft — two of Vermeer's best-known works, in a building small enough to see properly in an hour.

The Rijksmuseum holds a handful of Vermeers too, including The Milkmaid and Woman Reading a Letter — so a full Vermeer day realistically means Amsterdam and The Hague, or Amsterdam and Delft itself, not one single stop.