Museum Gouda, South Holland Province, The Netherlands

4Natalja M 5:00 PM Nov 30, 2020

This museum is Definitely worth visiting
A very nice museum, with all different pieces of historical heritages to be found: a surgeons’ room, pharmacy, chapel, ceramics, pottery and art exposition and even Saint Nicholas himself ?but he is visiting till beg December due to his activities with children). I love “ Still life”, temporary exhibition of Dutch and Belgium artists. Good learning techniques and colors. The permanent collection contains the "Gouda Night Watch", painting by Rembrandt's student Ferdinand Bol and it’s pretty much like the original "Night Watch". The courtyard of the museum is very special and restful.

3Trainbleu 5:00 PM Mar 20, 2021

Good for a rainy day
We visited the city museum with a combination ticket bought at St John’s church (17 euros pp. instead of 15, as mentioned in the tourist brochure). The museum wasn’t the local history museum we expected. The exhibits were a very mixed bag ranging from huge group portraits of the citizen militia and religious paintings to a lovely reconstructed hospital pharmacy and artefacts relating to the history of local production of clay pipes and glazed earthenware pottery. There were also several temporary exhibitions. Rather too much to take in in one go. As it was the first Sunday of the month, there was a free presentation of an impressive maquette of Gouda in the year 1562, when the town was still catholic and dotted with (later demolished) monasteries. The presentation wasn’t very lively though. The museum is located in the medieval former St Catherine’s hospital and chapel and its layout is rather complicated. So, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the floor plan during the visit because we only found out later we had missed an interesting sounding basement section containing torture instruments and a lunatic's cell. For us, the best surprise was the lovely museum courtyard at Achter de Kerk with the cute Lazarus gate dating from 1609, which is one of the museum entrances. The courtyard is freely accessible. Due to the pandemic, the museum is closed until March 30th 2021