[8] The Rijksmuseum was founded in The Hague on 19 November 1798 and moved to Amsterdam in 1808, where it was first located in the Royal Palace and later in the Trippenhuis.

[3] On 13 April 2013, after a ten-year renovation which cost €375 million, the main building was reopened by Queen Beatrix.

Its origins were modest, with its collection fitting into five rooms at the Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague.

Although the seventeenth century was beginning to be recognized as the key period in Dutch art, the museum did not then hold paintings by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer, or Jacob van Ruisdael.

Napoleon had carried off the stadholder's collection to Paris; the paintings were returned to The Netherlands in 1815 but housed in the Mauritshuis in The Hague rather than the Rijksmuseum.

[1][15] On 31 May 1800, the National Art Gallery (Dutch: Nationale Kunst-Galerij), precursor of the Rijksmuseum, opened in Huis ten Bosch in The Hague.

On the orders of king Louis Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, the museum moved to Amsterdam in 1808.

The winners were B. van Hove and Frantz Vermeylen [fr] for the sculptures, Georg Sturm [nl] for the tile panels and painting and W.F.

During this renovation, about 400 objects from the collection were on display in the 'fragment building', including Rembrandt's The Night Watch and other 17th-century masterpieces.

[9] On 1 November 2014, the Philips Wing reopened with the exhibition Modern Times: Photography in the 20th Century.

In the central axis is a tunnel with the entrances at ground level and the Gallery of Honour at the first floor.

According to Muriel Huisman, Project Architect for the Rijksmuseum's renovation, "Cruz y Ortiz always like to look for synergy between old and new, and we try not to explain things with our architecture".

"[32] The collection of the Rijksmuseum consists of 1 million objects and is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history from the years 1200 to 2000.

[35][36] As of January 2021, the Rijksstudio hosts 700,000 works, available under a Creative Commons 1.0 Universal license, essentially copyright-free and royalty-free.

in 2019, to mark the 350th anniversary of the artist's death, the museum mounted an exhibition of all the works by Rembrandt in its collection.

Principal features were the marriage portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit along with the presentation of the Night Watch immediately before its planned restoration.

Besides objects, such as a wooden block for locking slaves, paintings, archival documents, oral sources, poems and music, the exhibition also presented connections of the slavery system at home in the Netherlands.

[39] In the permanent collection, labels were added to 77 paintings and objects that had been seen as symbols of the country's wealth and power to indicate previously hidden links to slavery.

[41] It was complemented by audio tours and videos relating personal and real-life stories[42] as well as an accompanying book titled Slavery.

[43] From 10 February until June 2023 the Rijksmuseum began to exhibit the biggest collection of Vermeers ever, with 28 of the known 37 works on display.