Pierre Cuypers: The building of the Rijksmsueum (1885)

As you probably know, the main part of the Rijksmuseum building is being renovated and therefore, largely closed to the public for a long time. One of the goals of the restoration is to expose the original structure of the building, as designed by its architect Cuypers. In that light, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the history of the Rijksmuseum and its creator: Pierre Cuypers.
In his own time, P.J.H. Cuypers (1827-1921) was known in the first place as the designer of numerous neo-Gothic churches. The neo-Gothic style was seen as an expression of the emancipation of the Catholic belief in our, officially Protestant, country, a movement in which Cuypers played a leading role. Therefore, it was not without controversy that he got the commission to design a museum to house the Dutch national collection: the Rijks (State) museum.
The idea was to depict the characteristics of the leading historical and artistic phases The Netherlands had gone through during the last centuries. Cuypers’ design showed a combination of Gothic and Renaissance elements, and mixed it with numerous other historic styles. The building itself, together with its sculptures, tile tableaus, decoration of the walls and ceilings and its stained glass windows, all contributed to commemorate the glorious Dutch past, in the form of a so-called Gesamtkunstwerk. Another superb design of his hand from the same period, Amsterdam’s Central Railway Station (1889), shows similar traits.
In spite of his eclectic design, Cuypers received harsh criticism from Protestant circles. They thought the Gothic (read: catholic) component was much too dominant, at the expense of that of the Dutch Renaissance, the style of the ‘Golden Age’ of the Republic. The disapproval was so strong that nota bene the Dutch king, William III, refused to open the new national museum on July 13, 1885, commenting he would ‘never set foot in that cloister’.