AMSTERDAM.- From today the masterpieces in the Rijksmuseum can be found on Google Arts & Culture, the Google Cultural Institute’s website (also available as an app for Android and iOS). The digital collection contains some 200,000 objects. This has made the Rijksmuseum the best represented museum in the Google Cultural Institute. A thousand international institutions are affiliated to the Google Cultural Institute. The website reaches more than forty million people each year. The Rijksmuseum’s own website attracts six million visitors annually.

Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum, says ‘We are proud that the Rijksmuseum is the largest museum in the Google Cultural Institute. The collaboration perfectly reflects our view that the Rijksmuseum is owned by everyone and is for everyone. It means that even more people worldwide can enjoy the collection.’

From today everyone can wander through all the aisles of the nineteenth-century building with Google Street View and look at the renovated interior. With a smartphone and Google Cardboard the Rijksmuseum can be brought to life in Virtual Reality. Coinciding with the recording of the digital collection in Google, five new digital exhibitions are being opened.

The exhibitions:

● Jan Steen, a born storyteller, shows how he incorporated many different themes in his paintings

● The Night Watch examines the individual details of this iconic work of art

● Johannes Vermeer Details of his masterpieces unveiled

● Rembrandt van Rijn An overview of this artist

● Joannes Lutma A Dutch goldsmith

Vermeer is particularly well represented in Google Arts & Culture with thirty-five masterpieces in total, including the four that hang in the Rijksmuseum.