Saturday 26 June 2010

Museum Het Rembrandthuis (Amsterdam) - en: Rembrandt House Museum

[Post published by Liviu on Liviu's [in Netherlands] Blog]

18th of June: quite dark, dull, cloudy, a bit rainy, the usual Amsterdam weather.


Museum Het Rembrandthuis (en: Rembrandt House Museum)
Admission: free for Museumkaart holders. Feel free to check the detailed price list.
There are lockers at the basement, of course.
Pictures are allowed, but, as always, no flash.
You also get the audio tour for free.


My opinion on Rembrandt House Museum

For the record, the full name is Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

Pretty cool museum.
Kind of too many tourists - oh, well, it's a famous museum and it's also in the historical center, therefore it makes sense to be so crowded. The downside is one shall get most of the photos with people wandering around.

Highlights:

The kitchen: pretty cool. I liked it. If I lived back then, I wish I had a kitchen like that. I don't know, everything seemed to make sense.

The wooden spiral-shaped stairs: awesome, really awesome! I've never seen such cool stairs. I risked and took photos with the flash on just to make sure I get perfect pictures of the stairs.

The entrance hall and the anteroom: smart move of Rembrandt to decorate both of these with his paintings and other artists' paintings that he wanted to sell - basically it was like an exhibition with paintings for sale. Indeed, Rembrandt was both an artist and art dealer, which was quite common at the time. So, to put it in the present day web language, he monetized both his content and other artists' content :D

The box beds: really coll. They seem and really are quite small due to 2 reasons:
  1. People were much shorter back then.
  2. People used to sleep from middle up in almost a standing position, not completely horizontal like we do today, because... they believed that if they slept completely horizontally a wave of blood might hit their brain and die during sleep... Ok, laugh if you will, but given the life expectancy during those times their belief seems reasonable & understandable although it's wrong...
The live demonstration on printing etchings [wikipedia] et. al.: awesome. The lady both thoroughly explained the process and showed how it was done.

The painting/art studios: nice, I guess, given that both Rembrandt and his pupils produced cool paintings.

There's also a collections of etchings displayed, including the famous The Three Trees [metmuseum.org; rembrandtpainting.net; British Museum; The Library of Congress on Flickr].
Note: I've just discovered a list of other Rembrandt's etchings on rembrandtpainting.net



View Netherlands (by Liviu) in a larger map


The temporary exhibition Picturalism in Dutch Photography

Quite nice.
The explanations on the walls and artists' biographies helped me understand what it was all about. Ok, the name should say it all, but I'm not that much into art/culture, so the more explanations the better.
I appreciate I was allowed to take photos of the photos, unlike at Huis Marseille or FOAM.


Conclusions

I recommend you visit Museum Het Rembrandthuis. It's nice & cool, it's interesting and all your friends will want to know things about it...



F.A.Q.:

Q.1: Where is Rembrandt's Night Watch displayed?
A.1: At the Rijksmuseum.

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