Museum Willet-Holthuysen
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of the stately house at Herengracht 605, with its sandstone facade and its steps leading up to the door, and imagine it at night in the 1870s, with every window lit and carriages waiting on the quay. This was the home of a couple who lived for art.
Key Facts
| Place | Museum Willet-Holthuysen |
|---|---|
| Address | Herengracht 605, 1017 CE Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36560, 4.89900 |
| Part of Walk | Rembrandt's Amsterdam: The Night Watch, the Syndics & the Amstel |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of the stately house at Herengracht 605, with its sandstone facade and its steps leading up to the door, and imagine it at night in the 1870s, with every window lit and carriages waiting on the quay. This was the home of a couple who lived for art.
The house dates from the late seventeenth century, but its most famous residents arrived much later. Louisa Holthuysen was the daughter of a rich merchant who had bought the house in the nineteenth century. In 1861 she married Abraham Willet, a passionate collector, and together they filled these rooms with paintings, silver, glass, ceramics and books. They entertained, travelled and decorated in the lavish taste of their age, all gilded mirrors and silk walls.
Abraham died in 1888. Louisa lived on alone in the great house, and Amsterdam gossip turned her into an eccentric recluse, surrounded, so the story goes, by her cats. How much of that is true nobody can say for sure. What is certain is what she did at the end: when she died in 1895, she left the house and everything in it to the city, on condition that it became a museum.
And so it did, in 1896. That gift is why you can still see what a grand canal house looked like inside, the ballroom, the dining room laid for a banquet, the kitchen in the basement and, at the back, a formal garden laid out in the French style. Canal-house gardens are one of Amsterdam's best-kept secrets, invisible from the street, and this is one of the very few you can visit.
Think of it as the opposite of the Rembrandthuis. Rembrandt lost his house and his collection to debt, and they survive only because clerks made a list. The Willets kept everything and gave it away freely. Now walk west along the Herengracht, turn left down the Reguliersgracht with its row of little bridges, and right along the Keizersgracht, to the house where one of Rembrandt's pupils came to live in style.