Hello and welcome! to another A-Z series on M-i-V...
All through April I'm posting on the broad theme of Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. Come museum hopping with me!
R is for Musée Rodin
I first came across Rodin as a
young teenager when a selection of his works went on display at the
National Museum in Delhi on a touring exhibition of India. The Kiss and The
Thinker were both part of that and made a huge impact - so much so that when I
visited Paris decades later, I went looking for those masterpieces in their
original home to relive that experience, but with a greater maturity and. a
more nuanced, in-depth appreciation.
Musée Rodin is spread over two
properties associated with the famous sculptor - Hôtel Biron in
central Paris near the Invalides and his residence and workshop just outside
Paris in Meudon.
“I bequeath to the state all my
works in plaster, marble, bronze and stone, together with my drawings and the
collection of antiquities that I had such pleasure in assembling for the
education and training of artists and workers. And I ask the state to keep all
these collections in the Hôtel Biron, which will be the Musée Rodin, reserving
the right to reside there for the rest of my life.”
Auguste Rodin, 1909. (Source)
We went to the Hôtel Biron,
on a morning when snow had dusted the grounds lightly - that trip had been our first experience
of falling snow, both the kiddie son and his mother were equally thrilled.
Now the building has its own history and weight, it was built in the 1720s by the architect to the king... so...It is a lovely building in itself and historically significant, later use by Rodin just piles on another layer.
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Hotel Biron. It had snowed that morning, but there was nothing of it on any of
the artworks displayed in the sculpture garden. |
The museum is the most comprehensive on Rodin, his work he left as his legacy to the world. It has a huge collection of his sculptures and drawings, as well as his personal collection of objects d'art from Egypt, Far East, Greece and Rome. In all the museum has holdings of over 40,000 including some 25,000 photographs. Many of the sculptures are displayed in the grounds.
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The Kiss. 1882. All the tenderness in the world in that
hand laid on the woman's thigh. Happy to report
that the thrill didn't diminish with age! |
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| The Thinker (1904) in the sculpture garden. Equally as thrilling. |
When we went in there was a travelling exhibition of Henry Moore's work as well in the sculpture garden, which was a massive bonus - two greats with one trip! Because of the snow/cold, we had the whole garden to ourselves too, another bonus. However, that was the off season certainly, I'm sure things are different in the summer or even the spring.
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Also thrilled to find works by Henry Moore being
exhibited in the grounds. |
The annual visitor numbers to the main museum at Hôtel Birot are estimated at just over 600,000, with about 14,000 visitors going onto the Meudon site. Not the same heft as the big three Paris museums by footfall, but very much worth the visit for sculpture fans. Read more about the Musee Rodin by clicking this link here and here.
R is also for...Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands national museum of art and history, located in a museum cluster with two others in the Museumplein or Museum Square in Amsterdam. I visited it a very long time ago in the late nineties and haven't had the chance to go back since. I have no photographs of the museum, though I did manage to locate the ones I got at other locations.
What I remember about it is how dense it was - gallery after gallery or art, and ceramics, and sculpture, and old historical maps and what have you. For a country that is a so minute - it ranks at 131 out of 195 by area - for such a teeny-tiny nation, the size and range of its museum was superbly stunning to me. But then the Dutch are different and do things differently too.
Incidentally, I worked for a Dutch boss at the time, who very kindly passed on a whole bundle of maps and tips - the internet wasn't the bottomless info heap it is now, Google hadn't become a global Goliath and smartphones were still in the future. Travel wasn't the paperless activity it is. Fun fact - the Dutch VOC had factories in India, and one of them was quite close to my hometown, in a place called Chinsurah. They traded with Bengal for over 200 years till the Brits upstaged them. . As a result of which, Bengali has many loanwords from Dutch. Anyway, back to the museum.
The Rijksmuseum has a collection of over 1 million from 1200 CE to 2000. It has a superb art collection, displaying the works of major Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Frans Hals. The museum is different from most other art museums in that it didn't begin with a royal collection but with a national art gallery to which the Dutch stadtholders contributed. The Museum originated with 200 artworks in The Hague in 1800 and grew by acquisitions. It was moved to Amsterdam in 1808, split up and housed at different places, moved back to The Hague, chop and change a few times before moving to its present location in the Rijksmuseum building in 1885.
Must see works there are in the Gallery of Honour and include but are not limited to :
- The Night Watch - Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642
- The Milkmaid - Johannes Vermeer, c 1660
- The Threatened Swan - Jan Asselijn c 1650
- The Jewish Bride - Rembrandt van Rijn C 1665
- Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters - Hendrik Avercamp, 1608
- The Merry Family - Jan Steen.
The Rijksmuseum is the most visited museum in Amsterdam and drew over 2.3 million visitors in 2025. Pre-pandemic numbers were slightly higher at around 2.7 million. It ranks among the top 25 art museums globally. Both the footfall and the rankings are majorly influenced by Amsterdam being a tourism hub. Note also that the Rijksmuseum has significantly digitised much of its collections and its online visitors are many times the number of physical visitors at over 8 million. It has a pretty impressive reach on its various SM platforms too - 77 million at last count.
I can very honestly tell you that I enjoyed my physical visit there all those years ago and also my virtual visit this month to research for this post. Their website is a treat! Read more about the Rijkmuseum by
clicking the link here and
here.
Other candidates for this post were the Railway Museum in York, UK and the Reserve Bank of India Museum in Kolkata, India, both are specialised museums on subjects other than art, which I think this series has come to be dominated by. What do you think? Time for some other types of museums perhaps?
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Thank you for visiting and reading. Have a wonderful A-Z if you are taking the Challenge and a wonderful April if you're not!
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