Rembrandt House Museum

Rembrandt van Rijn bought this house on what was then Jodenbreestraat in 1639, at the peak of his success as Amsterdam's most sought-after portraitist, and lived here for nearly twenty years — the years in which he painted some of his best-known work and ran a busy studio with paying pupils. He lost the house in 1656 when he was declared bankrupt, partly from overspending on his own vast art and curiosity collection, and the resulting bankruptcy inventory — a room-by-room list of everything he owned — is the single reason museum curators today know exactly how to furnish the rooms.

That inventory has let the museum reconstruct Rembrandt's actual living spaces with unusual precision: the kitchen, the box-bed he would have slept in, and above all his painting studio, laid out with the north-facing light, easel positions and pigment-grinding equipment a 17th-century painter needed. A separate room houses his etching studio and a working period printing press, where museum staff periodically demonstrate the etching process he used for prints like his famous self-portraits.