Art at Schiphol Airport
Schiphol Airport serves over fifty million visitors a year. This sleek, modern airport is one of Europe’s main transport hubs. Amsterdam centre is only a twenty-minute train ride away. If your layover does not allow you to travel to Amsterdam, Schiphol is the ideal airport to spend a few hours.
Tax-free shops, casinos, massage chairs, Wi-Fi hotspots and works of art will comfort transit passengers. Cafes and restaurants serve frothy cappuccino and exotic meals. See planes take off and land through the large windows. Lounge in one of the easy chairs while reading a magazine or newspaper.
Schiphol Rijksmuseum
In 2002, Rijksmuseum was the first museum to open an annex at an airport. Schiphol Rijksmuseum is a little oases of art and deserves your visit. The museum displays a permanent exhibition of ten works of Jan Steen, Jacob Ruysdael and Rembrandt. Three times a year, a temporary exhibition shows works of art from the Rijksmuseum collection.
Sunny Skies in the Golden Age
The current exhibition, Sunny Skies in the Golden Age, features works of 17th-century Dutch landscape painters inspired by the Italian landscape and the Mediterranean light. Dutch artists travelled to Italy to study works from classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Known as Italianist, Jan Both, Jan Hackaert, Adam Pynacker and others spent several years in Italy and produced Italian inspired works, characterized by sunny, cypress-filled landscapes. Their works were very popular with Dutch painters who did not have the opportunity to travel to Italy. Dutch artists like Nicolaas Berchem and Albert Cuyp started painting Italian landscapes without having seen the real thing. The exhibition Sunny Skies in the Golden Age displays a selection of paintings by Italianists who influenced Dutch artists who did not travel abroad.
Museum Shop
The museum is one flight of stairs up, no lift. You will have to drag you luggage up because there is no place to store it. On the ground floor, attached to the museum is the museum shop crammed with Dutch Masters-themed souvenirs. Browse the art books or buy reproductions of Vermeer, Rembrandt and other Dutch Masters. Delft blue pottery, postcards and art related gadgets are souvenirs that do not take much space and will easily fit in your hand luggage.
Adam Pynacker, Landscape with Goatherd, 1650
QUICK FACTS:
WHAT: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Schiphol
WHERE: Schiphol Airport, behind passport control between E and F pier (map)
CURRENT EXHIBITION: Sunny Skies in the Golden Age, until 1 September 2010
ADMISSION: free
OPENING HOURS: daily 7 am – 8 pm
photo credit: wikipedia
