Rijksmuseum

When this opened in 1885, the king refused to perform the ceremony. He said he would never set foot in “that monastery”.

The national collection is older than its building. It was founded in 1798 in The Hague, moved to Amsterdam ten years later, and spent most of the 19th century crammed into a canal mansion, the Trippenhuis, where The Night Watch hung in a room too small to step back from.

A proper museum was finally commissioned in the 1870s, and the design went to Pierre Cuypers. He was the leading church architect in the country, and a Catholic. What he built looks like it: towers, pointed roofs, stained glass, walls covered in tiles and carving. Protestant critics were appalled that the treasure house of a Protestant nation looked like a cathedral, and King William III stayed away.

Cuypers was building Centraal Station at the same time, which is why the two could be sisters. He planned this one around a single painting. A gallery runs down the middle of the upper floor like the nave of a church, and at the end of it, where the altar would be, hangs The Night Watch.

One thing about the building is pure Amsterdam. The city insisted that the road should not be blocked, so the museum has a street through the middle of it. Thousands of people cycle through the national museum every day.