Does the Rijksmuseum have works by Jeroen Bosch and Pieter Brueghel?
There are no works by Jeroen Bosch or Pieter Brueghel on display in the Rijksmuseum, which mainly features art from the northern Netherlands. The painters Bosch and Brueghel hailed from the southern region of the country. The Prado museum in Madrid has the largest collection of works by Jeroen Bosch. Many of Pieter Brueghel’s paintings are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. There is only one museum in the Netherlands that has a painting by Pieter Brueghel: Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Why is it that the Rijksmuseum collection features mainly Dutch painters, and only a few foreign artists? From the late 16th century, the Netherlands was a republic. In other words, there was no royal house that amassed an international collection, such as in Spain (Philips II) or Russia (Catharine the Great). Art buyers were citizens. They made purchases mostly in their home country, and not so much abroad. The Rijksmuseum collection is based on these private collections. What happe
