Visitors to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) 2012-2020

The Stedelijk Museum is a museum in Amsterdam for contemporary art and design. As a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the number of visitors to this institution fell sharply in 2020 over the previous year. Overall, the Stedelijk Museum welcomed roughly 268 thousand visitors in 2020, whereas it recorded around 670 thousand visitors in 2019. Other popular museums in the Netherlands experienced a significant drop in attendance in 2020, as a result of the emergency restrictions put in place during the health crisis. For instance, the number of visitors to the Rijksmuseum - a renowned national art and history museum based in Amsterdam - decreased from 2.7 million in 2019 to approximately 675 thousand in 2020.

Art museums attracted the most visitors

As of 2019, the Dutch Museum Association recorded a total of 438 museums in the Netherlands. Most of them were in the province of Noord-Holland. In terms of museum visitors, art museums recorded the highest number, welcoming roughly 14 million individuals. Similarly, history museums attracted 13.7 million people.

The Van Gogh museum

Together with the Stedelijk Museum and the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum is one of the most popular museums in the Netherlands. This institution, owning the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world, registered about 2.13 million visitors in 2019, although the number of visitors dropped to 500 thousand in 2020, due to the pandemic.