The major works
Cats by Picasso, Rembrandt and Steinlen.
Rudolphous โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท PersianDutchNetwork โ Public domain ยท Jacob Olie โ Public domain ยท Andy Li โ CC0
It depends what you are paying for. If you want a serious art museum, no โ the collection is thematic rather than historical. But the ticket also buys entry to a seventeenth-century canal house with its rooms, stairs and garden, which is what you pay comparable money for at any other canal house museum. Treat it as a canal house with an odd collection rather than an art museum in a handsome building, and on that measure it is fair.
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The KattenKabinet is a museum in a canal house on the Herengracht devoted to a single subject: the cat in art. Paintings, sculpture, posters, stamps and books, from works by Picasso, Rembrandt and Steinlen to twentieth-century advertising. Its origin is entirely personal. A Dutch businessman founded it in 1990 in memory of his cat John Pierpont Morgan, who had lived with him for seventeen years and whom he had named after the American banker as a joke. The collection grew from there into one of the largest in the world on this narrow subject. The unexpected part is that the museum is inhabited: several real cats live in the house and wander among the visitors, sleeping on the chairs and tables, and they are a declared part of the experience. The house itself is seventeenth century, on the Golden Bend, with its original rooms โ so even anyone indifferent to cats sees a canal house from the inside.
Cats by Picasso, Rembrandt and Steinlen.
Original seventeenth-century rooms.
Herengracht 497, 1017 Amsterdam