Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum is the one museum every first-time visitor to Amsterdam should see, and it rewards everyone from art lovers to children who have never heard of Rembrandt. Pierre Cuypers' red-brick palace, opened in 1885 at the head of what became Museumplein, looks like a cross between a Gothic cathedral and a railway station — fittingly, since Cuypers also designed Amsterdam Centraal — and a public passage runs straight through the middle of it, so cyclists famously pedal under the museum on their way across the city. After a ten-year renovation it reopened in 2013 with its collection rearranged chronologically, so you walk through Dutch history from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century with paintings, furniture, silver, weapons, costume and ship models side by side. The heart of it all is the Gallery of Honour on the upper floor, a long, top-lit hall lined with the masterpieces of the seventeenth century: Vermeer's Milkmaid and Woman Reading a Letter, Frans Hals' joyful portraits, Jan Steen's chaotic households and Rembrandt's Jewish Bride. At the far end hangs The Night Watch, Rembrandt's enormous militia portrait of 1642, which has been the subject of Operation Night Watch, the largest research and conservation project in its history, carried out in public view inside a glass chamber so that visitors can watch conservators at work. Elsewhere, look for the astonishing dolls' houses of wealthy Amsterdam women, the model ships and the Cuypers Library, the most beautiful reading room in the city, which you can view from a gallery. Entry is by timed ticket bought online, under-18s go free, and the museum is open every day of the year; mornings and late afternoons are calmest.

Understanding the layout makes a big museum manageable. The ground floor covers the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with religious art and sculpture, plus special collections of Asian art in the pavilion. The first floor runs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second floor holds the Golden Age, where most visitors head first; and the top floor brings the story into the twentieth century, with an early Dutch airplane among the curiosities. The free Rijksmuseum app offers multimedia tours, including a highlights route that covers the essentials in about an hour and family routes that turn the visit into a game, and it is worth downloading before you arrive. If you only have ninety minutes, go straight to the Gallery of Honour and The Night Watch, then spend the rest of your time on the model ships and the dolls' houses, which bring Golden Age wealth to life more vividly than any painting.

Visiting well: book a timed slot online, especially in spring, summer and school holidays, and aim for opening time or the last two hours of the day, when tour groups thin out. The cloakroom is free and large bags must be checked. The Night Watch room is busiest mid-morning; if you arrive at opening, walk straight there before circling back to the earlier galleries. Conservation work on Rembrandt's masterpiece has been staged in phases, so the painting may be behind glass or partly obscured by scaffolding during your visit — it is still worth seeing, and the research findings displayed beside it are fascinating. The Rijksmuseum Gardens around the building are free to enter and host sculpture exhibitions in summer, and the museum's café and its fine-dining restaurant next door make it easy to break the visit in two.

Around the museum, Museumplein puts three major collections within a few minutes' walk: the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk modern art museum face each other across the lawn, and the Concertgebouw closes the far end. Combining the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in one day is common and perfectly doable if you book a morning slot at one and an afternoon slot at the other, with lunch and a stroll in the nearby Vondelpark in between. Families should collect the children's activity materials and let kids hunt for animals and ships in the paintings; couples might save the museum for a quiet late-afternoon slot, when the light softens in the Gallery of Honour. Trams from Centraal stop right outside, and the walk from the Leidseplein takes ten minutes.