The Rijksmuseum in 2020

On social media the Rijksmuseum expanded its reach to larger audiences than ever before, connecting to a total of 78 million people through new online offerings such as #rijksmuseumunlocked and #rijksmuseumfromhome.

The Rijksmuseum implemented budget cuts, and alongside government support, we were able to count on the support of our partners. Founder Philips and main sponsor KPN extended their partnership this year, and the museum also welcomed a new sponsor: VolkerWessels.

2020 in figures

• The number of people visiting the Rijksmuseum in 2020 totalled 675,000. This is more than 2 million down on last year.
• 64% of the visitors were based in the Netherlands, and 20% were children.
• 26% of all visitors came from Amsterdam. This represents a relative growth of 20% on 2019.
• Since reopening on 1 June, the museum has maintained an average of 77% of maximum capacity.
• The total number of visitors in 2020 is the lowest since 1964, when 686,553 people visited the Rijksmuseum.
• The Rijksmuseum rated 8.9 for customer appreciation of their visit. The museum achieved a total of 72 on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric, which gauges visitor intention to recommend the museum to other people. This score is higher than in previous years.
• The Rijksmuseum had a total reach of 78 million through its media channels.
• The number of people following the Rijksmuseum on social media channels rose by 23% in 2020. The Rijksmuseum has a total of 1.4 million followers across all social media.
• The Rijksmuseum website received 5.5 million unique visitors – 2.2 million of these were unique visitors to Rijksstudio.

Partners, donors, Friends, funds and sponsors

• In November, the Rijksmuseum’s founder Philips extended its partnership with the museum for five years.
• In December, the Rijksmuseum’s main sponsor KPN extended its partnership with the museum for one year.
• On 1 December, VolkerWessels became a partner of the Rijksmuseum. Eerde International Boarding School and JCDecaux will continue to partner the Rijksmuseum.
• Almost all the members of the Rijksclub are continuing their affiliation with the Rijksmuseum, and five new members have been added.
• All the members of the International Circle are continuing their affiliation with the Rijksmuseum.
• The Rijksmuseum was able to count on its 18,000 Friends in 2020.
• The renewed grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a contribution from the Terra Foundation for American Art will ensure that international art historians and other scholars will be able to continue participating in activities at the Rijksmuseum.

Exhibitions

• The Rijksmuseum staged six exhibitions in 2020: Caravaggio-Bernini. Baroque in Rome; Thanks to Waller 2010-2020; Willem Diepraam; Document Nederland Junior;
• The Best of the 19th Century at Rijksmuseum Schiphol; and Ed van der Elsken. Crazy World.
• 165,000 people visited the Rijksmuseum to see Caravaggio-Bernini. Baroque in Rome, which was made possible in part by Ammodo, ING, Kvadrat, Rijkspatronen and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
• Most of the planned exhibitions were postponed until 2021, due to Covid-19.
• Seven new displays were mounted in the main building, including Historical Amsterdam, a presentation of city views over the centuries, from the collection of the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Gemeenschap (‘Royal Antiquarian Society’, KOG) and The Strength of Dutch Museum Collections: Piero di Cosimo, thanks to the support of the Rembrandt Association and the Turing Foundation.

Operation Night Watch

• Operation Night Watch, the largest and most extensive study ever conducted into Rembrandt’s masterpiece, went live in July 2019, enabling the public to follow its progress.
• In 2020 the focus of Operation Night Watch was on research, involving the use of innovative scanning technologies such as Macro XRF, OCT, Macro XRPD, ultra-high resolution photography, infrared reflectography, Reflectance Imaging Spectroscopy, 3D scanning and UV photography.
• In May, the Rijksmuseum presented the most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch.
• Covid-19 led to the postponing of the conservation phase.
• Operation Night Watch is being carried out in collaboration with its main partner AkzoNobel, as well as universities and museums in the Netherlands and abroad. Operation Night Watch is made possible by AkzoNobel and a large number of private donors and funds, through the Rijksmuseum Fund.

Online

• November saw the launch of the new Rijksmuseum website, with its Stories platform hosting 10 series about the museum.
• During the first lockdown, the Rijksmuseum presented 10 ways to visit the museum from home, through concepts such as #rijksmuseumfromhome, in which museum staff shared stories about their favourite artworks from home.
• Spring also saw the release of Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close, an online tour that attracted 350,000 unique visitors. The tour won a Gouden Lovie and the People’s Choice Award. Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close is connected by KPN.
• The number of listeners to the Rijksmuseum podcast series In het Rijks has risen sharply this year, from 60,000 in 2019 to 240,000 in 2020.

Partnerships in the Netherlands

• The Netherlands Collection Centre (CCNL), a partnership with Holland Open Air Museum, Paleis Het Loo Museum and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, is nearing completion. Objects are currently being transferred to the CCNL. This centre situated near the city of Amersfoort is scheduled to open in mid-2021.
• November saw the opening of the Koele Wateren (‘Cool Waters’) exhibition at Museum Het Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom. It is part of a series of exhibitions tours with the overarching title Schatten uit het Rijks (‘Treasures from the Rijksmuseum’), staged in collaboration with the city museums of Zutphen, Hoorn, Harlingen, Bergen op Zoom and Gouda.
• Centraal Museum, Teylers Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstmuseum Den Haag received a total of 225 works from Pieter and Marieke Sanders. A selection from this collection will be on show until 21 March 2021 in Collector’s Item, an exhibition at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. Ludo van Halem, the Rijksmuseum’s Curator of 20th Century Art, is one of the guest curators of the exhibition.
• The Rijksmuseum instigated the Cultural AI Lab in collaboration with the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (‘Centre for Mathematics and Informatics’, CWI), the KNAW Humanities Cluster, the KB, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, TNO, the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• The Rijksmuseum has been a participating museum in Musea Bekennen Kleur (‘Museums Show Their Colour’) since 2019.
• The Rijksmuseum has loaned a total of 620 objects to 77 institutions and organisations (48 in the Netherlands, 29 abroad).

Education

• 42,000 schoolgoers visited the Rijksmuseum this year, compared to 200,000 in 2019.
• Almost 20,000 pupils made use of the free coach transport made possible by BankGiro Lottery players.
• Together with our partner ThiemeMeulenhoff, we developed online teaching material that complies with the Dutch digital school curriculum. The material was viewed 15,000 times.
• We partnered with the Municipality of Amsterdam to celebrate the centenary of school gardens in the city, and made our own school garden in the Rijksmuseum gardens. The children’s cookbook Het geheim van de tuin (‘The Secret of the Garden’), by Jan Paul Schutten and Joris Bijdendijk was also released this year.
• Rijksmuseum received more than 300 entries for Document Nederland Junior. The winning entrants were 14-year-old Harriet Derby in the secondary school category, and 22-year-old Joel Quayson in the further vocational education (MBO) category. Document Nederland Junior was made possible by Janivo Stichting.
• On 3 June, national broadcaster NPO2 presented De Eindexamen Geschiedenis Quiz (‘The History Final Exam Quiz’), which attracted 500,000 viewers. It was a gesture to all those school graduation candidates who were unable to do the final exams this academic year. The Rijksmuseum made the programme in collaboration with ThiemeMeulenhoff and NTR.

Accessibility

• Stichting Edwin Bouw Fonds enabled the Rijksmuseum to appoint an accessibility manager again for 2020.
• Three actual-size replicas of The Night Watch have been touring hospitals and nursing homes since July. This initiative took place through a partnership with Philips, and was made possible by the Elizabeth Art Foundation and Pon. More than forty hospitals and homes have now had one of the replicas on display.
• The Rijksmuseum opened for four ‘low stimulus’ evenings.
• The Rijksmuseum developed several tours for families and children: a ‘low stimulus’ tour, a tour for the blind and visually impaired, and a sign language tour.
• An in situ tour was developed for people with dementia.

Acquisitions

• Arendt Brinks, Bram Volkers, and Eduard Planting and Marque Joosten transferred 37 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe to the Rijksmuseum. This acquisition was made possible by the BankGiro lottery players.
• André Kuipers donated to the museum the Dutch flag that he took with him to the International Space Station (ISS).
• The Rijksmuseum, in partnership with Nederlands Fotomuseum, acquired the estate of Ed van der Elsken. The estate was for a large part donated by Anneke Hilhorst, and partly purchased with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its dedicated Photography and Video Fund and Dura Kunstfonds), BankGiro Lottery players, the Paul Huf Fund/Rijksmuseum Fund and the Marque Joosten and Eduard Planting Fund/Rijksmuseum Fund.
• A newly acquired floral still life Jacob Vosmaer (painted in 1613) was shown in the museum for the first time at the reopening on 1 June. This work was acquired thanks to the support of Mondriaan Fonds, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science’s National Acquisition Fund, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its Nationaal Fonds Kunstbezit and its dedicated Seventeenth-Century Painting Fund, and to a contribution from Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds), the BankGiro Lottery, the Rijksmuseum International Circle, and a private donor. __- Bob Haboldt donated a painting by Bartholomeus Spranger (The Body of Christ Supported by Angels (Angel Pietà), c. 1587) to the Rijksmuseum in remembrance of the victims of Covid-19.
• Rituals enabled the Rijksmuseum to purchase two Asian paintings, from the 18th and 19th centuries, at Tefaf.
• Thanks to Helen and Lorenz van der Meij, the Rijksmuseum was able to purchase an 1896 self-portrait by Antoon Hendricus Johannes Molkenboer.
• In January the Rijksmuseum acquired a portrait of Ott van Bronckhorst by Cornelia toe Boecop (painted in 1606), thanks to Hans & Hedy de Klerk/Rijksmuseum Fund and the Joost and Carin Scholten Fund/Rijksmuseum Fund.
• In January, Rijksmuseum received a work by Willem Drost (Cimon and Pero, painted c. 1655) as a long-term loan from the Broere Charitable Foundation.

Special activities

• On Friday 11 December, De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig performed at the first of the Rijksmuseum Sessions, a concerts series in partnership with Heineken.
• On 11 October Alemeh M. Yengiabad won the Rijksstudio Award for her design of The Book, which presents masterpieces in braille. The Rijksstudio Award is the Rijksmuseum’s design award, made possible by Adobe.
• On King’s Day (27 April), main sponsor ING staged a special online concert by Davina Michelle and Snelle in the Rijksmuseum.
• On 31 October, the Rijksmuseum hosted the first online Nacht van de Geschiedenis (‘History Night’) – made possible by Berenschot.