As you may have noted by now, we went to a lot of museums while we were in Amsterdam. Most of them were excellent – some of the best we’d ever visited.
But not all met that standard. Enter: the Hermitage Amsterdam.
The Hermitage Amsterdam is the sister museum of the famous Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. The State Hermitage Museum was started in the late 1700s by Catharine the Great, and currently has one of the largest and most valuable art collections in the world. It spans across several buildings, including the Winter Palace where the Russian royal family once lived. It’s a bucket-list kind of museum for most museum nerds, which is why I was excited to visit the Hermitage Amsterdam.
Since 2009 the Hermitage Amsterdam has been the Hermitage’s largest satellite location, in keeping with the museum’s mandate to increase the global reach of their impressive collection.
Given the nature of their collection, and the difficulties of transporting art, I suspect that there is a wide range in quality of exhibits at the Hermitage Amsterdam. We visited in August, but beginning in October until May 2018 they’re hosting an exhibit called “Dutch Masters”. Prior to that, their last major exhibit ended in January 2017.
The main exhibit on during our visit was about the Russian Revolution… while it was quite educational, it was light on art and on artifacts in general. The big disappointment was the ratio of fabrege egg information to fabrege eggs themselves… felt like a million to zero. But we did learn a lot about the Russian Revolution, which was interesting because this year marked the 100 year anniversary of its beginning.
Still, for the price we paid to get in, we did not at all feel that it was worth it. However, for a different exhibit, I can imagine feeling differently. This may be one worth visiting, but do your research first.
The one exhibit that we did quite enjoy was the “Portrait Gallery of the Golden Age”, which was entirely comprised of large scale photos of Dutch guild members and other merchants. Otherwise, we weren’t impressed, but we’ll have our eye on this place for future visits.
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