The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (‘state museum’ in English) is a Dutch national museum located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam. The museum is devoted to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art.

The Print Room
The Print Room (Rijksprentenkabinet) holds the largest collection of prints, drawings and photographs in The Netherlands. Due to the size and the fragility of the collection, works on paper are not on permanent display. Selections can be viewed in temporary exhibitions that generally last three months. Interested parties may examine prints, drawings and photographs on request in the reading room.

Photographs
In 1996, the Dutch national collections of 19th century photography, including the Hartkamp Collection and the Diepraam Collection, were added to the collections in the Print Room. The Rijksmuseum itself already had many exquisite photographs among its older possessions, such as a series of Amsterdam cityscapes by George Hendrik Breitner and a previously undiscovered photographic panorama of Baalbek by the famous French photographer Gustave le Gray.

At this time, the sum total of photographs, including those from the Dutch History Department and the National Photography Collection, is over 100,000. The National Photography Collection contains work by scores of important photographers from The Netherlands, England, Germany, France and the United States. William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Eduard Isaac Asser, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Man Ray are just a few examples of over 5000 photographers whose work is kept. Thanks in part to funding from the Paul Huf Foundation (Paul Huf Fonds), works by Dutch and international photographers from the 19th and, more recently, the 20th century have been purchased. The Print Room also has hundreds of photo albums and a huge collection of photographically illustrated books. The Rijksmuseum was also the initiator of the collaborative project www.earlyphotography.nl, a digital catalogue of early photography (before 1860) from the Dutch collections.

Print room open Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00 hrs.
Admission to print room is free. Identification is required.
Museum open Mon-Sunday, 09.00 to 18.00 hrs.

Director of Rijksmuseum is Wim Pijbes.