The story
The Amsterdam Museum tells the story of one city, and for most of its life it did so from a fitting home, the old civic orphanage, a set of seventeenth-century courtyards where the city's orphans were raised for centuries. It traces how a marshy fishing settlement became, in the 1600s, the richest trading hub in the world.
Its collection leans on the group portrait, the civic-guard companies and charity boards that Amsterdammers commissioned to show themselves running the city. A covered public alley of these giant militia pictures, free to walk through, shows the same civic pride that produced Rembrandt's Night Watch elsewhere in town.
The main site has been under long renovation, so displays have moved around the city, but the subject stays fixed, the invention and self-image of Amsterdam, told partly through the faces of the people who governed it.
