A Night at the Rijksmuseum

As the French philosopher Descartes said, "God made the world,

"but the Dutch made Holland."

And there is nowhere more uniquely, beautifully Dutch than Amsterdam.

This wonderful city that seems almost to float on the water.

But for the last ten years this has also been a city

with a gaping cultural hole where its heart should be.

This is the Rijksmuseum, one of the world's great museums.

Holland's equivalent to the National Gallery or the Louvre.

And yet, for the last ten years it has been closed to the public,

undergoing a massive restoration.

The closure of the Rijksmuseum was a big hole in the national life.

We missed all these beautiful things.

Can you imagine the French rolling the Mona Lisa through the streets?

Only in Holland would this happen.

I consider the Rijksmuseum the nucleus,

or more or less the egg we crawled out.

There are very few countries where the National Museum has been

entirely re-thought, reinvented.

It really is amazing. Everybody is very excited, having it open again.

The national treasures of the Dutch people are inside this museum.

Wow! It is just unbelievable!

For over a decade, people all over the museum world -

but above all the Dutch people - have been waiting, waiting, waiting.

But now the wait is over.

So, join me on a journey to rediscover

the treasures of a great nation.

Welcome to the Rijksmuseum 2013.

This is the scene of probably the most remarkable,

most expensive, most ambitious remodelling

of one of the world's major museums ever undertaken.

The whole place is buzzing with crowds, journalists, TV crews,

but actually, compared to the last few weeks, it is relatively calm.

It's been a hive of activity here.

They have been frantically putting the last touches

to their great museum and we have had a backstage pass.

Over the last few weeks, we have been privileged enough to watch

how the Dutch have reinvented their single greatest monument to the past.

It is all happening. Paintings are arriving in crates.

They are coming out of their boxes, going up on the walls.

The whole place is buzzing with machinery.

Which painting is this?

-Love Letter.

-That is Vermeer's Love Letter? I can't believe it!

-So there is a Vermeer under there?

-Yes.

-And you are not shaking!

-A little bit.

-Yeah.

Take the painting, and I put it on the wall.

-You are going to do that now?

-Yes.

-Wow!

-In a second.

-Thank you.

That is iconic. This is one of the great paintings in the world.

The gentleman behind the cameraman,

he doesn't want to be on television,

he doesn't like being on television,

but he has agreed to be on television to hang the picture.

We really appreciate that. Oh! Wow!

Ha!

I can't believe it! It looks like it was painted yesterday.

-Isn't it fantastic?

-The glass is clean.

The glass is clean. What a beautiful painting.

Now, the Rijksmuseum's collections

are jaw-droppingly rich and varied.

There are treasures from Asia and the Far East.

There are masterpieces of painting like this Monet, or,

over here, a wonderfully piercing self-portrait by none other

than Vincent van Gogh.

But this is also a museum with a single overriding mission -

to tell the story of the Dutch past, to bring Holland to life.

In the past, the Rijksmuseum organised its collections on rather

traditional academic lines, department by department.

You know the sort of thing.

"Over here we have got glass, over there we have got silver.

"Gallery 3 is for ceramics, Galleries 22-29 for painting..."

But they have done away with all that now.

And in a very bold, daring, and highly effective way,

they have brought all of the arts together

and involved them

in this great chronological sweep through history.

And it is quite some achievement.

80 galleries, 80,000 objects, and 800 years of history.

So you really do need more than a couple of hours

to get to know this place.

The Rijksmuseum is about the Dutchness of Dutchness.

It was constructed in the 19th century as a symbol

for the Dutch nation and it houses the treasures of the Netherlands.

I think anyone coming to Amsterdam for the first time

and looking at the Rijksmuseum cannot fail to be struck

by how unique it is,

how extraordinary it is. There is no other building in the city like it.

It is this wonderful, neogothic, romantic fantasy -

a temple to art.

And nowadays it is one of the most popular,

most loved buildings in all of Holland - but it was not always so.

When it was first unveiled in 1885, it was regarded with horror.

"How Catholic!"

With its stained-glass windows, its resemblance to a cathedral,

the flamboyance of its colour and architecture,

many people saw it as a kind of fish bone lodged in the throat

of the Dutch state, which was inherently Protestant.

How dare Cuypers, the architect, a Catholic,

have erected this building in the heart of Amsterdam?!

And the king of the time, William III,

refused to set foot in the building.

My favourite detail on the whole building is that statue.

Do you see up there in the corner?

That is Cuypers himself, the architect, with his beard,

looking rather furtively around the corner of the building,

almost as if to say, "Oh, I am a Catholic,

"I'm in a Protestant world. Have I got away with it?!"

When we moved into this building, in the 19th century,

the collection only had 700 paintings. Now we have 6,000.

So the collection has grown a lot.

This meant that in the 20th century, the decorations,

the original decorations of the building, were obscured.

So the building slowly disappeared.

And I think that what the renovation did is that it gave

the building back its words, and the building speaks again.

And now it is in harmony with the objects.

Now, I remember coming to the Rijksmuseum 20 years ago

and, believe me, the transformation is truly mind-boggling.

This great central courtyard, full of light, space, a sense of air.

Where I am standing used to be underwater.

When they decided to modernise and renovate this vast building,

there were to be no half measures.

Large parts of it were completely gutted.

In the beginning, the process was supposed to take three years -

long enough, you may think.

In the end, it has taken them ten years to complete,

which gives you some idea of the many obstacles they had to overcome.

The sympathetic new design is as elegantly minimal

as Cuypers' original was extravagant.

And the delicate task of resurrecting the museum was

undertaken by Spanish architects Cruz Ortiz.

Being asked to design the new Rijksmuseum,

it's not quite like being asked to walk on water,

but you have certainly been asked to build on water!

The last time I was here, there was a canal down there.

What have you done with it?

It was the sea, actually, it was not a canal.

When you dig more than 1.5 metres,

after that you're under the level of the sea.

So actually, you have all the water pouring up.

And now this building has risen

almost, sort of, from the ashes of its former self.

It strikes me that you have been very sensitive

to the original architecture.

This building is a perfect example of the influence of the architecture

at the end of the 19th century.

When we were doing this kind of task,

you pay a tribute, let's say, that way, to the history of the building.

The whole project was scheduled for completion in 2008.

So what caused the immense delay?

Was it some astonishing aquatic engineering problem?

Was it some logistical issue? No. It was a uniquely Dutch issue.

-I think the biggest problem was the bicycle tunnel.

-You're kidding!

The bicycle tunnel? How? Put me in the picture.

When they decided to renovate this museum,

they also wanted to modernise it,

and they created a new space

in the middle of the museum.

So they closed down the bicycle tunnel,

and that would have been the central entrance.

Now, this central passageway, it is known as the city's gateway

and runs right through the centre of the Rijksmuseum

connecting the outskirts of the city to the centre.

And before the renovation began,

it was used by more than 13,000 cyclists every day.

So when the architects responsible for the revamping suggested

it be transformed and split it into two levels, there was mass revolt.

Holland's cycling lobby - hugely powerful here -

fell over the handlebars in disgust.

They staged demonstrations, sit-ins, they forced a major re-evaluation

of the whole architectural transformation of the museum.

When Cuypers built the Rijksmuseum

in the 1880s, it was at the border of the city.

And he built it over one of the important entrance roads

and he built like a city gate.

And it was meant to go under it.

So from a architectural point of view, from an urban point of view,

I think that we should stick to it.

I always agreed that the bicycle tunnel should go right through.

But I wanted the bicycles to ride in both laterals of the passage.

The passage has three ways.

We wanted the bicycles to ride in the two laterals,

but the bicycles wanted to ride in the centre, where the power is!

Ha-ha! That is great!

In the end, the architect had to redesign the whole plan

and that caused a major delay and a major extra money.

Protests over the bike passage added years to the project.

And the passions raised show the peculiar nature

of the Dutch attitude to this museum.

It is theirs, their national space.

What does the Rijksmuseum mean to the people of Amsterdam,

to the people of Holland? What does it mean to you?

The treasures of the country are held here.

-This is the main museum, the mother of all museums.

-I like that.

-So this is the mother, the mother of the Netherlands.

-Yes.

We should consider it as our own national identity

and the basis of where we come from.

If we consider this a museum for foreign people,

or for once every ten years to visit,

we will lose our identity, definitely.

We are facing times where we look for our identity. Well, it is here

and it was lost.

We lost our concept of what it is to be Dutch,

where our cultural identity derives from - we lost it all.

And we have to be proud of our Dutch culture.

If we understand where we came from, if we go to the Rijksmuseum,

look thoroughly, what was our basis? Where did Vermeer come from?

Rembrandt, etc, Mondrian? Especially now, we need it, our art.

I think it is just fantastic. But what do you think?

It really is amazing.

It is very beautiful with the colours on the wall,

the places where they renovated the original details,

it has been very amazing.

The starry sky. Did you see the starry sky?

-Yes, yes!

-It is dazzling.

-All the way from Glasgow!

That is our contribution!

Another way in which they have married the old

with the new here at the Rijksmuseum

is by intruding into some of the spaces

commissioned by living artists.

In this case, a work by the Glasgow-based,

Turner Prize-winning Richard Wright, whose taken a motif

from Cuypers' original design for the library, a star,

and turned it into this bedazzling pop art creation,

best experienced lying on your back.

I think you are allowed to lie on your back in here.

It is not just the museum that has been receiving a makeover.

Some of the world's most famous paintings have been getting

some pretty special treatment too.

When the galleries of the Rijksmuseum are finally open to the public,

this place will be seething, but while they have been closed,

they have taken the opportunity to do some truly innovative

research into some of their most precious pictures.

I feel like a child who has been sort of allowed a free run

in the toy shop. It is just amazing to see a naked Rembrandt.

And you are not even looking at the skin,

you are looking beneath the skin of the Rembrandt, right?

When I ambushed them they were in the middle of X-raying

Rembrandt's 1662 portrait of the Drapers' Guild.

The examination reveals fascinatingly how he struggled with composition,

especially when it came to placing the servant.

Basically, this gentleman there, the only one without the hat,

what you are saying is, Rembrandt was thinking,

"Where am I going to put him?"

-Right.

-Where did he start off, do we think?

We think he might have started off on the right,

because it is actually almost a finished head,

and he ended up here.

We can see that if we look at the hat of the man in the centre,

it is actually a lot taller than it is today.

So he probably moved him here and said, "Let's top off the hat,

"make it a bit smaller, and put him there."

Sometimes X-rays of paintings are really boring because they just

-show you the painting that is underneath in sketch form.

-Yes.

But this one, this is a really top X-ray.

But, Tim, what is going on over here?

Over here we have a 3D scanner.

What we are doing is scanning this entire painting.

-This is the Jewish Bride by Rembrandt.

-I know.

And we are scanning it with a resolution of ten micrometres,

This is a 3D scanner. We have two cameras,

in a stereo set up,

and it triangulates each point on the surface of the painting.

And we can get a lot of points from this painting, and from that we

can create a three-dimensional map of the painting, of the depth.

So in this painting he painted not only with thick brushstrokes,

-but also probably put a piece of dried paint on it...

-With his hands.

Correct.

And if we scale up the z-resolution,

the depth resolution a bit, we can make it look like this.

This has been exaggerated 50 times.

And you can see the plasters of paint all over here.

-You can see the squiggle here.

-That is amazing!

-You can see the drabs of paint going over it.

-It is like Arizona.

-It is like the painted desert. It is like...

-Or maybe like Mars?

This is the most amazing thing.

This really says something about the health of the painting.

Three global cracks running along the painting.

A lot of small cracks in between.

Could you do me, like, a big favour?

Because, as it happens, like van Gogh

who was obsessed by this painting -

he used to stand in front of it for hours at a time,

saying it was the most infinitely sympathetic picture.

He was obsessed by that yellow, buttery sleeve.

He was completely hypnotised by it.

And if you look at the van Gogh sunflower, I think he is trying to...

If you want to look at a van Gogh sunflower, I have one here as well.

Is this guy...? I have got to take you back to England with me!

-Here it comes.

-That is a Vincent van Gogh sunflower?

That is a Vincent van Gogh sunflower!

Ha-ha! Look at that. Stop it there.

-You can see drabs of paint.

-Look at that! That is amazing.

What I love about the way that he did the sunflowers is that he uses

paint not just as a representational medium, but...

-It is almost as sculpture.

-Yes. Give me five! Absolutely.

You can see the point of his brush in there, you can

see some hairs running along.

It is like every painting, through Tim's new lens,

becomes like a planet.

Take me back to The Jewish Bride.

To me, that is like you have got a helicopter and you are flying

over the painting and the painting turns into a landscape.

That is just fantastic. And what an anarchist Rembrandt was!

Once he put the paint on there,

he could have painted that with his nose!

That is just unbelievable!

Wow! I'd say that is one of the best things I have seen.

-Thank you so much.

-No problem, glad to be of service.

-Wow!

So, if you want to see the main draw, the star attraction, look over here.

It is The Night Watch, Holland's most iconic painting.

It is not just the most important painting in Holland,

this is a true national treasure.

A wonderfully raucous expression of the Dutch national character.

Here they are, the Burgher class, in all their drunken splendour.

But look at the size of this picture. It's 16 foot by 12.

Getting it into place was almost as big a job as finishing

the reconstruction of the museum.

Completed in 1642, The Night Watch is Rembrandt's most famous work.

Far too popular to keep away from public view.

So while the main building was being restored, it was always on display

in a smaller wing of the museum.

And when it was time for it to move back home, it caused quite a stir.

I think it is wonderful. The Night Watch on a crane!

30 foot above the ground. Everybody here going, "Don't drop it!"

I do think this is more than slightly surreal.

The painting is hugely symbolic for the people of Holland,

in all sorts of ways.

The most famous artist, Rembrandt. It is an image of, supposedly,

civic solidarity, so it stands for the nation, in a way.

It is coming through a triumphal arch. That is a nice touch.

Oh, it is terribly close to the top of the arch!

It is like a football match. They are cheering the painting.

There are kids over there, there are thousands of people here. Whoo!

What a fantastic way to mark the opening of the Rijksmuseum!

Can you imagine the French, rolling the Mona Lisa through the streets?

-Only in Holland would this happen. I think it is superb.

-We are Dutch.

This national treasure belongs, really, to everybody.

And it took just a very short distance to bring it

from the other building to this building.

Yes, we have cranes, and yes, it is on the street, and yes,

the sun was shining and everybody was there.

So we made a kind of ceremony, procession, almost.

I think the fascinating thing about The Night Watch is that

in France, the Louvre, the icon is the Mona Lisa, an Italian painting.

But for the Rijksmuseum,

what makes the Rijksmuseum so special

is that it has this national character.

It is very much interwoven with The Night Watch,

with the Dutch identity.

And complex as that identity is,

people kind of still feel, "This is our national icon."

And that is also why there is so much excitement

when it is being moved.

The picture is so big, so fragile, so precious,

that they actually cut a slot into the 19th century brick work

to allow it to be lifted safely home.

At the high altar of this cathedral of art that Cuypers

constructed, there is The Night Watch.

But what does The Night Watch show?

The most important painting of the Netherlands is not a king,

a queen, Christ on the cross. No, it is Burghers.

And they are pharmacists, merchants, and lawyers.

Talk about pride of place!

Pride of place!

Everything in the museum has been moved around, changed around.

Every single work of art is not to be found where it once was,

except for this one. The Night Watch.

Now, one of the things that is totally unique about the Rijksmuseum

as a national museum of art, it's the only one in the world that

was constructed entirely around one picture. This picture.

The room itself proclaims Rembrandt's genius, tells the story

in its inscription of his life, and at the centre is this picture,

which I suppose to a Dutchman it is almost a talisman, it is

a touchstone, it is a symbol of national identity.

A wonderful artist, Rembrandt.

He is the Shakespeare of painting.

Like Shakespeare, he breaks all the rules.

And what bubbles through the surface of his canvases is this profound,

unruly, raucous sense of humanity.

He is the painter of human beings,

as Shakespeare is the writer of human beings.

That is what you get.

What is it that makes a painting live forever in people's

heart and soul?

I think one of the most important things is mystery.

It is mystery. If you understand it, it is kind of dead.

And this picture is mysterious,

that was the word van Gogh used about Rembrandt. "He is mysterious.

"So mysterious that he seems to use paint to say

"things for which we have no words."

And at the heart of the painting,

for me it is the heart, there is this really enigmatic detail.

A little girl, lit by that shaft of Rembrandt light,

but she has the face, she has the face of his wife Saskia,

who died in the same year that this picture was delivered.

Was this the last time that he painted Saskia from the life?

But if so, why did he attach her face to the body of a little girl?

What is going on? We don't know.

I suspect this is some kind of Rembrandtian tribute to her memory.

But in the absence of the man himself,

we will never know what it really means.

When you think about the Rijksmuseum,

it is a museum not just of Dutch art but also Dutch history, is it not?

Is it important to you that the people of Holland can come here

-and in effect walk through their own past?

-Yes.

History and art go hand-in-hand and that is exactly what we want.

We have this sense of time and beauty.

And we have, if you walk through the galleries, on every floor,

a century of Dutch art, culture and history,

from the Middle Ages to Mondrian.

So you walk into a gallery and you see a ship model, or a gun,

and next to that, a beautiful painting.

-We are very much in Holland now.

-So here, you are blown away by this...

Just a little blown away, yes!

It is rather a sort of forbidding opening to a gallery!

This is really the time of the Dutch fighting the Spanish. And one of...

How many items are there in the entire collection of the Rijksmuseum?

There are over one million objects.

So for us it was incredibly difficult

to choose exactly the objects

that would tell the story of Dutch art and history,

and it was a lengthy process.

Urgh! Personally, I think that this

is the ugliest painting in the whole of the Rijksmuseum.

For me it is just a...

It is more than ugly, it is horrific. It is one of those...

Out of the one million things that are owned by the museum,

-how many are able to be displayed at one time here?

-8,000, we chose.

And we had a motto, where we said, "Less is more."

So we really chose objects that we think

show the culture, our beautiful works of art,

and give you a sense of time and a sense of beauty.

-They are masterpieces, aren't they?

-This also is fantastic.

-Is this going to be covered with glass or not?

-No.

That's one of the things I noticed, there's a lot of the paintings

you've kept naked, I call it, they've not got glass on them...

Yeah, we feel that you have to be able to appreciate them

in that way, and also here you have to be able to stand

face-to-face with the works of art.

And what has been the great driving purpose behind this massive

reconstruction? Well, fundamentally, to turn the museum itself

into a blank canvas upon which the curators can hang the works

in such a way that they tell the story of the Dutch,

and of Holland, and what a story it is.

Over the centuries, the Dutch state has taken many forms.

A relatively small area, it emerged from the Middle Ages

with disproportionate power and influence,

thanks to a native talent for trade.

The famously flat land of the Low Countries has never produced enough

agriculture to support itself, so commerce has always been essential.

The principles of free trade, and the tolerance that made

that possible, have always been at the heart

of the Dutch national psyche.

Holland's origins as an independent state lie in a violently colonial

relationship with the great villains of Dutch history - the Spanish.

There were anti-Spanish songs that were published

and people would sing them and there were books all about

the horrible crimes of the Spanish

and how the Dutch suffered under the Spanish,

particularly in the first half of the 17th century.

Maybe it was almost like, kind of, that anti-Spanish feeling was almost

a kind of a glue needed to cement together this new nation.

Yes, the idea nowadays that you cement a nation, you can make a nation

by setting up another, a strong other

and for the Dutch, the Spanish were the other.

The roots of the conflict reach back to 1555,

when control of mainly Protestant Holland passed

to the fanatically Catholic Spaniard Philip II.

With a hateful mistrust of his subjects,

he set out to suppress them.

So, how did the Dutch react to Philip's repressive policies?

Well, they attacked what he loved most -

the very fabric of the Catholic Church.

They attacked its superstitions, they attacked its priests,

they attacked the buildings that represented Philip and his faith.

They pulled down statues, they smashed stained-glass windows,

they destroyed paintings.

You can see it all here, laid out in vivid detail. The iconoclastic rage,

it was called.

Now, this violent upsurge of popular unrest expressed against Philip,

against Spain, against Catholicism, it would lead

to the great war of Dutch independence. A war so bloody

and so protracted that its very name conveys the pain of it all -

the Eighty Years' War.

Iconoclasm, the destruction of art, the desecration of a sacred space.

Well, you might think that all that is safely

in the Holland's Reformation past, but - tsk, tsk - have a look at this.

Now, this is the Great Hall. Isn't it fantastic?

I think anybody coming to the magnificently revamped Rijksmuseum

will instantly understand that this represents the beating heart

of the institution. It represent everything

that it was founded to say to the world about Holland.

What we have are scenes of Dutch history,

emblems of the proud spirit of Dutch independence.

It's got that kind of wonderful 19th-century sentimental

illogicality that you find in the V&A

and buildings like that in Britain, but what a wonderfully exuberant

expression of the idea that art is our temple.

But believe it or not, believe it or not...

..the history of Dutch iconoclasm, the history of the war between

the Protestant and Catholic was played out in this very space,

in the 1950s...

..when an officious public director of works decided that this

great space was giving people the wrong idea about Holland.

Holland was, as far as he was concerned, Protestant.

It was logical. It was clinical. It was sensible.

It wasn't artistic, it wasn't Catholic. So what did he do?

Can you believe it?

He had the whole space whitewashed. Whitewashed.

In the 1950s, '60s,

the Dutch became less and less religious.

In literature, you have books writing about terrible religious

parents who made you pray before every meal.

And that was the time that they wanted to get rid of this

religious Catholic building.

And also modernism helped them with it,

because you could paint everything white.

There was a twisted historical logic

behind this architectural desecration.

Whitewashing the Great Hall was a modern tribute to the sparse

Dutch Protestant churches of the Reformation.

Restoring it to its former glory took painstaking effort.

But the most extraordinary aspect of an already pretty extraordinary story

is the fact that this guy actually asked,

actually asked the principal conservator of paintings,

a wonderful lady called Mallya, who sadly is too ill to be on this show,

he ordered her to destroy the paintings. Can you believe that?

Telling the conservator of the Rijksmuseum to destroy paintings,

to burn them.

But she didn't. She hid them.

And now, thanks to the enlightened attitude of the modern renovators

of the Rijksmuseum, they are back in place.

It's a pretty amazing story.

Now, if you look through the 800 years spanned by the Rijksmuseum's

collection, there's one period in particular which I think

would set anyone's imagination on fire - the Dutch 17th century.

They call it the Golden Age and with good reason, because it was then,

extraordinarily, that this tiny, seafaring nation became

the great powerhouse of world politics, world trade, world finance.

Quite simply, the most powerful country in the world.

And also the most creative in terms of painting.

At the time, Holland was a political anomaly.

Despite having a population of less than two million, it had confidently

renounced Spanish and papal rule and functioned as a republic.

Without the straitjacket of the established order,

still in place throughout most of Europe, Dutch trade boomed.

Holland flourished.

So who ruled this new society, this new nation, Holland?

Well, it wasn't any king or prince, it wasn't the Pope or any priest.

It was men like these,

prosperous members of a rising merchant middle class.

The Burgher citizens of Amsterdam.

We have this extraordinary case of a country that is very small,

and they were by far the richest country in all of Europe

and in all of the world.

And not just because they had some very rich people,

but because wealth was also spread very widely for the time.

So there was a broad middle class that was able to participate

in this extraordinary culture.

Of course, you can't walk into the world of the past.

But I think this is the next best thing.

What a wonderful object it is. It's a 17th-century doll's house.

It must have cost a fortune. It was certainly, I suspect,

one of the more expensive Christmas presents given in the year 1675.

What's fascinating about it as well is that it offers us,

almost as a microcosm, the ideal home of the rich, Dutch

merchant class, the Burgher. This is how he was supposed to live.

Notice these people are avid collectors.

They are fascinated by painting.

They've got a Raphael on their wall, an old master.

And over the fireplace, in the main room, behind the master

of the house and the mistress, is a beautiful Dutch still life painting.

Painting everywhere.

In this prosperous emerging Dutch state,

the church and the nobility had been usurped from their

customary role as the biggest patrons of the arts.

The Dutch merchant class filled the gap,

creating a thriving middle-class art market.

Painters were reliant,

from now on, on the private citizens' patronage and they responded with

an energy that more than matched the vigour

of the merchants themselves.

Art, as a commodity, an object of trade and exchange,

had well and truly arrived.

Each new specifically Dutch form of painting produced its own new genius.

The cheekily vibrant portraits of Frans Hals.

The air-filled landscapes of Hobbema,

the sun-drenched idylls of Cuyp.

Vermeer's hymns...

..to domesticity.

And the most famous of them all - Rembrandt.

So where did they get the cash to pay for this amazing art boom?

Answer - expanding Dutch trade.

The Netherlands, we have always been on the crossroads of trade routes.

So the trade between the Mediterranean and the North

and England and the Continent

and the German hinterland all had to pass through the Low Countries.

Now, if you wanted to dominate world trade in the 17th century,

there was really only one way to do it.

You had to rule the waves,

and Dutch maritime supremacy was the key to Dutch trading success.

And, unsurprisingly, Dutch art is full of images

that celebrate the Dutch obsession with the sea.

No-one paints the details of ships, their rigging,

their sails filled by the wind, their cannon belching out flame

and smoke, no-one paints that with more obsessive interest

in detail than the Dutch artist.

This is the maritime gallery of the Rijksmuseum.

It's one of the most spectacular spaces.

They're putting the finishing touches to this wonderful

Dutch man-o'-war.

And pride of place is occupied by this painting.

And what it reminds us of is the fact that the Dutch naval expansion

in the 17th century did not go unnoticed,

least of all by the English. The Dutch fought three great naval wars

with the English,

and this picture commemorates the single most humiliating defeat

suffered by His Majesty's Royal Navy in all of history.

It's a depiction of the Medway Raid, as it was called.

Charles II of England had negotiated a truce with the Dutch,

but he had done so in bad faith.

They sniffed it out and they sailed their ships into the Thames Estuary,

catching the British Navy by surprise.

They set fire to the fleet. These are the heroic Dutch ships coming home,

and they towed away, they towed away, the flagship of the Royal Navy.

The man responsible, he is here.

Great hero of Dutch history, Michiel de Ruyter.

What a man. You don't want to mess with him, do you?

And the story continues as you move through the gallery,

because up here, what have we got? Amazing.

The only surviving remnant of a 17th-century battleship,

and what is it?

It's the prow of that flagship, towed away by Michiel de Ruyter.

And here it is erected in the stadium,

so to speak, of Dutch history, as a permanent scoreboard.

Holland one, England nil.

It wasn't just the destruction of His Majesty's Fleet that set the Dutch

and English against each other.

Soon, it was to be the prize of the English Crown itself.

By the late 17th century, the Stadtholder,

the ruler of Holland, was the young William III.

And this picture commemorates his marriage to his English cousin,

Mary Stuart, daughter of James II.

He was 14, she was 9.

And they've just got married.

Now you might think this was a happy ever after story, but in fact one of

the largest family spats in European royal history was about to erupt.

William was a Protestant,

and when his English father-in-law James produced a new son

and resolved to raise him as a Catholic, James's opponents

in England appealed to William to expel the unreforming king.

William set sail with a huge invasion force

and seized the English Crown, wife by his side.

Here they are. The china versions of William and Mary.

Now, William wasn't just a military man and a powerbroker.

He was somebody who revelled in the trappings of wealth and grandeur,

everything that came with his new role

both as Dutch stadtholder and English king.

He and his wife Mary were avaricious collectors of china,

fine arts, painting, silver, furniture,

and this section of the Rijksmuseum is almost like a cornucopia

overflowing with examples of their rather flowery taste.

This is William and Mary's bed.

Rather lumpy-looking, but how magnificent is that?

It's an embroiderer's dream,

or should that be embroiderer's nightmare?

Just imagine how many hours went into the creation

of this palace for sleeping.

It's an interesting reminder that,

although we think of William as this great figurehead of Protestant

culture, he was anything but a puritan.

Now, Dutch trade with the Far East is a vital part of the national story.

Think of modern Holland's most famous export.

Well, it was originally brought here from the Far East - the tulip.

The collections at the Rijksmuseum are full of the remains, the relics,

the residue of this fruitful interchange between East and West.

So much so that they've decided, in the newly revamped version

of the museum, to dedicate an entire new space to their Asian collections.

The Asian Pavilion.

The great Dutch trading adventure during the Golden Age took them

all over the world, but it was their roots to the Far East

that proved most profitable.

Such was their eastern dominance

that for two-and-a-half centuries they were the only Europeans,

the only outsiders, who traded with Japan.

And I think if you want to enjoy the fruits of the truly

extraordinary relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese,

this is the best place to come. This, for me, is one of the great

works of decorative art in the world.

It's a samurai military commander helmet,

created in Japan around the late 16th century.

When is battle declared? Battle is declared, it commences, at dawn.

As the sun rises, here he is. He has to be visible,

his troops number in thousands.

There he is at the centre of his army with the sun shining

on this extraordinary helmet,

turning him into a kind of beacon.

HE EXHALES

What a thing.

I don't reckon you want to be on the other side from him, but moving

from war, power, to luxury and bliss, isn't this a wonderful thing?

It's the image of a crane, the symbol of faithfulness

because the crane only has one partner.

It's thought that this beautiful lacquer creation,

which is also a box,

was used to serve food at wedding celebrations.

Look at the decoration, look at the skill, the subtlety.

This is just such a wonderful collection of objects.

I can pick anything, but I love this.

-Menno, how long have you been curator here?

-16 years, actually.

So, basically, two thirds of your professional career,

the museum has been closed.

It's a chunk out of my career, but I think it's worth it.

I think a lot of people, particularly from Britain perhaps, may be slightly

surprised to find such a wonderful Asian collection in the Rijksmuseum.

Isn't it nice?

There is a very long-standing relation with Asia.

The Dutch have been trading with Asia for over four centuries,

over four centuries, so in a way it's part of Dutch culture

to be outward-looking and exploring,

so in a way it's very appropriate to have this White Horizon

in our national museum in Amsterdam.

It gives a special context, it's like a counterbalance,

it balances out, it broadens the horizon of this otherwise

quite narrow story of Dutch history and culture.

So when you look at those wonderful Dutch seascapes, those boats,

and you think, "Well, where are they going?"

Then you come here and, "Ah, this is where they were going."

This is the world they found.

These guys are fantastic. What are we looking at here?

We're looking at two 14th-century temple guardians.

The wonderful thing about these pieces is that they are very clear

in their message.

These guys are here to keep evil out of the temple. It's pretty obvious.

Raarrr! They're fantastic. I mean, look at their muscles.

They've been in the gym, these guys.

I'll tell you what they remind me of, which is really interesting,

there's a crossover between English Medieval culture and Japanese Medieval culture.

Because what did we put on our churches, or the Dutch as well?

-Gargoyles, to ward off evil spirits.

-Yes.

And these guys are really sort of Japanese gargoyles, aren't they?

Imagine being in the 14th century. There's not a lot of visual input.

Yeah, you're coming down from your farm or your mountain

-and you see this.

-That must have been pretty stunning.

-Are they recently acquired?

-Yes. 2007.

It's a real addition to our collection of sculpture.

-There's just one favour that I wanted to ask you before we leave.

-Sure.

I know it might be a bit of an ask, but...you know that helmet?

-Yes.

-The fantastic samurai helmet?

-Mm.

-Would it be possible before the museum opens...

-You want to wear it?

You got it.

-Please.

-Go on, then.

-What a guy.

Now, one of the great challenges of any national museum is to grow

and expand with the passing of time.

And when the Rijksmuseum closed ten years ago, there was a huge gap

in the way in which it told the story of the Dutch nation.

It didn't have any object at all dating from after the end

of the 19th century.

In other words, the whole of the 20th century was a void.

This is the new 20th-century wing of the Rijksmuseum,

a collection bravely started from scratch.

New additions include their very first abstract works.

They also, I think rightly, celebrate design and architecture.

The modern Dutch are a nation of makers.

By completely reinventing the presentation of the collection,

you also started to see where we have certain weaknesses,

what our strengths are in the collection

and what you would want to show the public when you reopen.

So we started a collection of 20th-century art as well.

That's setting the bar pretty high, because I imagine it's not that easy

to get hold of a good Mondrian now.

Exactly. Well, it's a long-term project.

We now have some fantastic loans

and maybe one day we'll be able to buy one. But we don't...

-Maybe the right person will leave you one.

-Exactly.

That's what we always hope.

But we wanted to be of the level of the 17th century,

18th-century, 19th-century collection where, again,

placing the art in a historical context is essential.

I admire the museum's facing up to the bleaker parts

of modern Dutch history, especially the Nazi occupation.

Now, every object in this museum tells a story.

But this object tells a particularly dark one.

This chess set was presented by Himmler

to the leader of the Dutch National Socialist movement in 1940.

And what it represents is the territorial ambitions,

the colonialist greed of the Nazi movement.

The rooks are rocket launchers.

Instead of a king and a queen, you've got bombs.

Talk about war games.

It's enough to send a shiver down your spine.

I think the Rijksmuseum is more than a collection of objects.

It's also a shrine to collective memory,

and that's what this display case is all about.

It houses the jacket worn by a German Jewish lady

who had emigrated to Holland to try and find safety and had, in fact,

been confined within one of Hitler's death camps.

She survived, and this jacket, she kept it with her

till the end of her life.

She meticulously repaired it, as if...

..somehow she needed an object to remind her of the pain

that she had gone through and survived.

And what's extraordinary about the story is that the jacket was

gifted to the museum by the lady's daughter.

There's a twist to the story, which is that the mother

had never told the daughter that she'd been in the camp.

It was a complete surprise.

Coming to Amsterdam this week,

I don't think I've ever felt more intense civic, national

excitement about the opening, the reopening of a museum.

I'm slightly nervous about it, because the entire organisation,

all the people working here have put their heart in making the most

beautiful thing, and we hope, of course, that when the public enters

in millions, they will all kind of think the same.

But that you only know once they are there.

The closure of the Rijksmuseum was a big hole in national life.

We missed it. We've been missing it too long.

And when it closed down, it was going to be closed for only

a couple of years, but it's taken ten years.

It has been a bumpy road indeed. I mean, you run two marathons.

One is the finish, and the day of the opening,

and the second marathon starts at the day of the opening.

So we're ready and we are thrilled and ready to do our job.

Well, OK, it has been closed but here we are.

-Hooray!

-Hip, hip hurrah!

Hip, hip hurrah!

I'm so pleased that I can go back and see it all again.

It's like old friends.

Now, I have to own up,

I've been a bit tough on the modern Dutch in my time.

I've accused them of being more interested in money than art,

more concerned with import and export than Rembrandt and Vermeer,

more concerned with selling tulips than enjoying the spiritual ecstasy

of a sunflower painting by van Gogh.

But I have to say,

the grand reopening of the Rijksmuseum has really made me

think again. And I believe that now this place is open,

the Dutch people truly will embrace it with all their hearts.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd