Museum Van Loon

Why is it significant?

Stand on the Keizersgracht and look at the wide, calm facade of number 672, with its stone balustrade along the roofline and a twin house beside it. No stepped gables, no fuss: just quiet, expensive symmetry. This was where Amsterdam's money went when it wanted to look tasteful.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on the Keizersgracht and look at the wide, calm facade of number 672, with its stone balustrade along the roofline and a twin house beside it. No stepped gables, no fuss: just quiet, expensive symmetry. This was where Amsterdam's money went when it wanted to look tasteful.

The house was built in the early 1670s, designed by the architect Adriaan Dortsman, a master of this sober classical style. And one of its first residents was a painter: Ferdinand Bol, who as a young man had trained in Rembrandt's studio. Bol learned his master's warm shadows so well that some of his early works were once taken for Rembrandts.

But the pupil's life went the opposite way. While Rembrandt was declared insolvent and moved to a rented house in the Jordaan, Bol became a sought-after painter of official portraits and grand allegories for public buildings. Then, in 1669, he married a very wealthy widow, Anna van Erckel, and more or less put down his brushes for good. Imagine the teacher, old and broke across town, and the former apprentice, living in style on the Keizersgracht. Art history is full of such pairs, and Amsterdam keeps them a few streets apart.

The house is now named after a later family. The Van Loons, one of whose ancestors, Willem van Loon, was among the founders of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, came to live here at the end of the nineteenth century. Their descendants opened it as a museum in 1973, and its rooms are lined with centuries of family portraits, so you can watch the same nose and chin travel down the generations. At the back, beyond a formal garden, stands a coach house dressed up with a classical facade.

Compare it with the Willet-Holthuysen house you just saw: two canal houses, both opened to the public, one given by a lonely widow, one kept by a family that never quite left. Now head north, cross the Herengracht and walk up towards Reguliersbreestraat, where the last stop is a building that would have made even Rembrandt blink.