Amsterdam Culture

Amsterdam’s culture rests on a seventeenth-century high point and a twentieth-century liberal experiment.

Golden Age painting

An unusual art market: no church commissions after the Reformation and no royal court, so painters sold to ordinary prosperous households, which is why Dutch painting is full of domestic interiors, landscapes, still lifes and group portraits rather than saints and kings. Rembrandt worked here for forty years and went bankrupt doing it; the Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum is a militia group portrait that broke every convention of the form.

Brown cafes

The bruin cafe — small, dark, wood and tobacco-stained walls, sand on the floor in the oldest ones — is the city’s social institution, where you sit for hours over one beer and nobody hurries you.

Design

De Stijl and Mondrian came out of this country, and Dutch graphic design, architecture and typography remain internationally influential.

Music

The Concertgebouw is one of the finest concert halls in the world, and the city has a strong electronic and dance scene.

Eating and drinking

Dutch food has a modest reputation and mostly deserves it, but the city eats extremely well on what colonialism and immigration brought back: Indonesian rijsttafel, Surinamese roti, Turkish and Moroccan bakeries. The genuinely local contributions are herring eaten raw from a stall with onion, bitterballen with a beer, and jenever, the juniper spirit that gin descends from, drunk from a tulip glass filled to the brim.

Cycling culture

Around 900,000 bicycles for 880,000 residents, and infrastructure built for them since the 1970s.