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The story of Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of Dutch art and history and the largest art museum in the country. It was founded in The Hague on 19 November 1798, moved to Amsterdam in 1808 on the orders of King Louis Bonaparte, opened in the Royal Palace in 1809 and later moved to the Trippenhuis.
The present building by Pierre Cuypers, a mix of Gothic and Renaissance elements, was begun on 1 October 1876 and opened in 1885. On 13 April 2013 Queen Beatrix reopened it after a ten-year renovation that cost 375 million euros. Of its collection of one million objects from the years 1200 to 2000, some 8,000 are on display, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer.
In 2014 it welcomed 2.47 million visitors. Look for Rembrandt's Night Watch, which joined the collection when the museum moved to Amsterdam.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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