The director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Wim Pijbes, has more than one reason to be cheerful this week. The Dutch national museum of art and history was named the European Museum of the Year (Emya) on Saturday, 16 May. On Sunday the exhibition Late Rembrandt, which the Amsterdam museum co-organised with the National Gallery in London, closed, having attracted 520,000 visitors to the museum’s Philips Wing.
The European Museum Forum, which chose the Rijksmuseum from among the more than 40 contenders, singled out for praise the elegant rehang of its most famous paintings, the way the historic galleries integrate items from across the collections as well as the new Asian pavilion. “All celebrate the range and depth of the museum’s collections vividly,” the judges said.
Pijbes says that winning the award came as a surprise. It crowns a remarkable two years in the museum’s history after its €345m renovation and expansion, which took ten years to complete, was unveiled in April 2013. “It has been a continuous party since the reopening,” he says. Annual attendance is around 2.5 million visitors and the museum has just set a new record for a temporary exhibition with Late Rembrandt.
The prize, which was first awarded in 1977, has tended to go to industrial and archaeological rather than art museums. The last Dutch museum to be awarded the Emya trophy—a statuette in brass by Henry Moore called The Egg—was the national open-air museum, the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum in Arnhem.
The award recognises the quality of the museum’s management and curatorial ambition. The Rijksmuseum’s educational goals include welcoming every Dutch schoolchild under the age of 12. Last year around 400,000 schoolchildren visited. “I want every Dutch child to be able to see The Nightwatch—that’s my dream,” Pijbes says.
One dream that came true last year was seeing Rembrandt’s group portrait of a militia company, the museum’s most famous painting, featured on the front page of around 50 national newspapers, including the New York Times and The Times of London. The blanket coverage was the result of the US President’s visit. “That’s the pulling power of Obama and Rembrandt,” Pijbes says.
