Museum Van Loon occupies a grand house on Keizersgracht built in 1672, first owned by the painter Ferdinand Bol and later by the Van Loon family — co-founders of the Dutch East India Company — whose descendants still partly own the building today. Unlike some of the city's other canal-house museums, the rooms are presented as a lived-in home rather than a static period piece: family portraits going back centuries, original furniture, and a formal garden behind the house with a small coach house.
It's a good, less-visited counterpart to the Rijksmuseum's grand history — a direct look at how the merchant elite who financed the Golden Bend actually lived, on the canal that gives the Canal Ring its name.