Amsterdam is said to have more museums per square metre than any other city in the world. With its picturesque canal network and rich history, the Netherlands’ vibrant capital is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. If you’re not able to travel to Amsterdam in person, you can explore the city’s world-class museums and galleries online. Here’s my pick of Amsterdam’s best virtual museum and gallery tours.
The Night Watch, Rembrandt, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Copyright Gretta Schifano
Anne Frank House
Anne Frank House is where the Jewish wartime diarist lived in hiding with her parents, sister and another family during World War II. The building is now a museum in Anne’s memory, and it has some excellent online resources. You can explore the Secret Annex online, or put on your VR glasses and take a virtual stroll through the hiding place where Anne wrote her diary. You can also look around the house where the Frank family lived before going into hiding, and visit an online exhibition about Anne Frank’s life. The excellent Anne Frank video diary follows Anne’s experiences from March 1944 until her arrest in August 1944. You can explore Anne Frank House here.
Het Scheepvaartmuseum – Maritime Museum
Amsterdam’s National Maritime Museum is home to one of the world’s largest maritime collections, with approximately 400,000 objects covering 500 years of Dutch Maritime history. Housed in a former naval warehouse, the museum invites visitors to discover how the sea has shaped Dutch culture. You can explore the museum via Google Street View – tours cover East Indiaman Amsterdam, the Dutch Golden Age, navigational instruments, and whales through the ages. You can choose your virtual tour of the museum here.
Museum Het Rembrandthuis – Rembrandt House Museum
From 1639 to 1658, the artist Rembrandt lived and worked in the canal house that now contains the fantastic Rembrandt House Museum. Visitors to the museum can learn about Rembrandt as a teacher, collector, entrepreneur and Amsterdam resident, as well as Rembrandt as an artist. You can browse the museum’s collection here.
Rijksmuseum
The world-famous Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national arts and history museum. It’s the city’s grandest museum and has 80 galleries and around 8000 objects on display at any one time. Highlights include Old Masters such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, 17th-century dolls’ houses created for rich merchants’ wives, and the Cuypers Library, the country’s oldest and most extensive collection of art history texts.
You can dive into the collection and explore its stories here.
Dolls’ house of Petronella Oortman and The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Images courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Stedelijk Museum
The Stedelijk Museum is the largest Dutch museum of modern and contemporary art and design. The collection contains around 90,000 artworks and objects, dating from 1870 to the present, with works by artists such as Monet, Matisse and Picasso through to contemporary installations. You can watch tours of the collection and exhibitions here:
Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum is home to the world’s largest collection of artworks by Vincent van Gogh and has more than 200 paintings, 500 drawings and 700 of his letters. The collection includes celebrated works such as Sunflowers, Almond Blossom and The Bedroom, 1888. You can explore the museum from home and search for your favourite painting undisturbed by other visitors with this Google street view tour.
Verzets Resistance Museum
The Resistance Museum details the history of the Dutch resistance in World War II during the country’s occupation by Germany. Resistance in the Netherlands ranged from small acts such as displaying postage stamps with the Queen’s face, to activities such as spying for the Allies. The museum documents a variety of these activities and you can explore exhibit highlights here. You can watch a video introduction to the museum here:
More virtual museum & gallery tours
If you enjoyed this, you may also like these posts about virtual museum and gallery tours around the world – click on the images to read them:
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