Touch tour at the Rijksmuseum

Last week I was in Amsterdam attending the third Tactile Reading and Graphics Conference. As always when I travel, I try to squeeze in at least a museum visit. This time, it was the Rijksmuseum, for several reasons. One that it was already recommended to me as an accessible experience, but even more importantly because one of the keynote speakers, Cathelijne Denekamp, who is their accessibility manager wrote a book about their accessibility work, Accessibility without limits. I read the book before my trip and I was really impressed. I quickly bought a ticket for a Sunday morning to explore the museum on my own. I read in the book that it is set up so that a person without any vision and a phone could navigate the property and enjoy the exhibit.

In the meantime, I wrote a quick message to Cathelijne that I really liked her book, and I was looking forward to visiting the museum and meeting her at the conference. In a few hours she got back to me, basically just two days before my visit and offered a guided tour. I thought I could get even more out of my visit that way, so I took her offer instead of navigating the museum on my own. Unfortunately I only had a couple of hours, so I was not able to take advantage of everything. Later last week I even found out that they have a huge coin collection and they made parts of it accessible. Some of my readers may know, I am a coin collector since I was a kid, so I’ll try to get more info about it soon, but for now, about the museum.

When I arrived Jana met me at the front desk and gave me an outstanding tour.

First we talked about the building, which was huge. I read somewhere that at some point, it was the biggest building in Amsterdam, so I definitely would have a lot to explore. Fortunately, there was a small model of the building, actually two, one was a 3D printed one, and the other a more complex building. They had done such a great job with that one. It was quite large, as I remember probably about a half meter wide, and you could open the top, which showed the top floor. Then, just like a book turned sideways, you could open each floor. On the floors there were small buttons and arrows, and when pressed, I could hear an audio narration in English about that part of the building. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to listen to everything, but it was such a great idea. Now I have to go back at least for two things…

Then Jana took me around the museum, and she showed me a few paintings in tactile form. I wouldn’t say it was 3D, but it was much more than a drawing of the original. One of the paintings was the Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer. I found this painting very complex, at least for my own tactile literacy. It was too hard to recognize the shapes, I would say it was too complex for me to understand. But that’s not the real point, what I found most interesting here was the representation of what a painting looks like. I have touched very few paintings in my life, and most of them were oversimplified so that blind people can grasp the outlines. This was much closer to the original thus it was unique and educational to me.

At the end we sat in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which is a large painting, so the tactile replica was only showing a part of it, which I actually found to be better because I was able to feel it in greater detail. At the end, I got to feel a small frame with a canvas on it with painting. It was a little replica of part of the original painting to let people feel what would the painting feel like if we were able to touch it. It is subjective, but to me this was almost the most interesting part. Being able to sit in front of a famous painting and touch a little piece of it as it probably feels in real life.

Then, unfortunately I had to run to the next meeting, but there is so much more to this museum, one day I would like to spend more time there.

I am also adding it to my list of Tactile museums.

Thank you Cathelijne for making it happen, and Jana for the excellent tour.