Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum Unlocks a Global Gateway to Art and History with Neo4j

Art deserves an audience. Every masterpiece locked away is a missed opportunity to inspire, educate, and transform.

The Rijksmuseum stands as one of the world’s most significant cultural institutions, housing over one million artistic and historical objects and 450,000 books. From Rembrandt’s The Night Watch to Vermeer’s intimate domestic scenes, medieval manuscripts and contemporary installations, the museum preserves remarkable examples of Dutch and European art spanning eight centuries. Each piece represents the evolution of human creativity, cultural exchange, and societal transformation.

Yet, the Rijksmuseum can only display about 8,000 works at a time in its physical galleries. With 2.5 million annual visitors, that still leaves millions more worldwide unable to access this vast repository of human creativity and historical knowledge. And when just a fraction of the collection is on view, what’s seen — and what’s not — becomes a question of curation. Who decides which pieces matter? What stories are told?

The Rijksmuseum set out to reimagine the gallery experience with a new website powered by Neo4j: the Collection. The Collection continues a centuries-old Dutch tradition of shaping the future of art itself,  redefining how we experience culture through technology.

Above: The home page for Rijksmuseum’s new Online Collection feature, powered by Neo4j.

Expanding Beyond Physical Galleries

The museum first began providing high-resolution images to the public domain through Rijksstudio, a free tool that anyone online could access.

“The more you share online, the more you inspire humanity,” says Erwin Verbruggen, Technical Project Lead at Q42, the museum’s technology partner. “We don’t see digital replacing physical visits. One enriches the other. Art multiplies when shared.”

But as technology evolved, so did the museum’s mission. Static images weren’t enough. People needed to explore. To discover. To fall in love with art they never knew existed.

“Our concept was to create an immersive, visually rich experience that inspires infinite browsing à la social media, with limitless search to take advantage of the power of linked data,” says Peter Gorgels, Manager of Digital Projects for the Rijksmuseum.

This vision of linked data pointed directly to graph technology.

Consider a simple search for “Rembrandt” in a traditional database. You’d get a list of his paintings, maybe some basic biographical data. But imagine wanting to explore his influence on Dutch art — to trace how his techniques spread through his students to their students, how his workshop practices shaped an entire generation of artists, or how his subjects reflected the social upheavals of 17th-century Amsterdam. In a traditional relational database, each of these connections would require a separate search, if the data existed at all. Curators knew these relationships existed but had no way to surface them digitally.

As Verbruggen explains, “When you click on Rembrandt in our new system, Neo4j instantly traverses all the relationships — every painting he created, every material he used, every subject in his works, every book written about him in our library.”

Unlike NoSQL approaches relying on tags or flat lists, the graph model supports limitless traversal across interwoven concepts, allowing users to hop dynamically from artists to techniques, subjects, eras, and cities.

The team at Rijksmuseum ran workshops with both designers and curators to ensure the interface could support academic inquiry as well as exploration from the general public. The goal was creating discovery experiences that felt engaging and intuitive — achieving the ‘infinite browsing’ or flow-state that users often experience on sites such as Wikipedia. 

Finding the Right Technology Partner

The team built a prototype focused on user experience. They evaluated several graph technologies against specific requirements: enabling fast, intuitive exploration across their vast collection. 

The graph needed to connect multiple data types:

• Artist names and biographical information
• Object types and artistic techniques
• Subject categories and themes
• Materials and creation methods
• Geographic locations and time periods

“Neo4j stood out because it’s a directional graph, which was very useful for setting up relationships to meet the project’s goals of extreme navigational flexibility for our visitors,” said Verbruggen. “We appreciated Neo4j’s maturity, including rich documentation and a high adoption rate.”

Rijksmuseum took a cloud-first approach to building out its architecture. The museum connects Neo4j AuraDB to its homegrown content management system (CMS), running the entire environment on Microsoft Azure.

The depth of these connections pushes technological boundaries. Where typical e-commerce recommendations might traverse 2-3 relationship layers (“customers who bought X also bought Y”), the Rijksmuseum’s art historical connections routinely span 15-20 layers deep. Tracing how a single artistic motif — say, the treatment of light through a window — evolved from Byzantine mosaics through Renaissance frescoes to Dutch domestic scenes requires following relationships across centuries, geographies, and dozens of artists. Each additional layer exponentially increases the computational complexity, yet the system must respond instantly to maintain that sense of fluid discovery.

Above: Cloud architecture: Neo4j AuraDB enables fast searching across 840,000+ cultural objects.

Creating an Intuitive Discovery Experience

The new Online Collection transforms scholarly research and casual browsing alike. Take Rembrandt van Rijn: both as a creator, and as a central node within Dutch Golden Age culture. A single click reveals an intricate web: his 50+ documented students spreading across Europe, each carrying techniques that evolved into new schools of thought. The Online Collection maps how Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro technique influenced Jan Lievens, who taught in Antwerp, spreading the style to Flemish baroque. It connects his bankruptcy records to changes in his painting materials, linking economic history to artistic evolution.

A researcher studying urban development can trace how Rembrandt’s workshop locations reflected Amsterdam’s expansion. An art student can follow the evolution of a single brushstroke technique across three generations of painters. Each connection opens new avenues of understanding that would take months to uncover through traditional research.




Above: Each image tile links to detailed views. Click to see high-resolution images. Zoom to examine details. Download for research or enjoyment. Build your own “Gallery of Honour” to create personalized collections.

Above: Examples of expanded tool bars after an initial search.

The Neo4j graph provides smart suggestions as you search. Click through to Rembrandt’s student Govert Flinck, and another pattern emerges: students who left before the bankruptcy continued using expensive pigments, while those who stayed adopted their master’s economical techniques. Suddenly, you’re not just finding paintings — you are witnessing how economic pressure created a new aesthetic movement. The muted earth tones we associate with late Rembrandt weren’t just artistic choice; they were economic necessity transformed into profound artistic expression.

This is what distinguishes the platform. Every search becomes a research journey. A curator investigating Dutch Golden Age interiors discovers that paintings featuring Turkish carpets spike during specific years — cross-reference with trade records, and you’re uncovering how the Dutch-Ottoman silk trade influenced domestic artistic tastes. Art historians have identified previously unknown artist collaborations by noticing shared rare pigments appearing in works from the same year. The system helps users move from asking “what” to understanding “why” and “how.”

Fueling Curiosity and Opening Minds to New Perspectives

“People love the whole Online Collection experience and the expanding toolbar where their curiosity can run free,” says Gorgels. The museum has curated hundreds of node pages for popular topics — individual artists, historical figures, and themes spanning arts, culture, politics, economy, and everyday life.

The metrics demonstrate strong adoption:

• Page views increased 40% as people worldwide explore the collection
• Online visitors grew 30% since launching the new experience
• Over 840,000 objects and books are now searchable online

These metrics reflect a fundamental shift in how people engage with cultural heritage. The 4-minute average session time suggests users aren’t just browsing; they’re researching, learning, making discoveries. Art history professors might encourage students to uncover connections that lead to new thesis topics. International researchers may access primary sources previously requiring physical visits to Amsterdam. The platform has become essential infrastructure for global art scholarship, setting a new standard for how cultural institutions should approach digital transformation.

“We say our art really belongs to everyone. We’re obliged to open doors any way we can to make our artworks accessible to anyone in the world. Neo4j helps us accomplish this important mission,” says Gorgels.

By making their collection digitally accessible, the Rijksmuseum ensures its entire collection can educate and inspire audiences far beyond Amsterdam.