Katwijks Museum

The Katwijks Museum in Katwijk, Netherlands, exhibits paintings from the early 20th-century artists’ colony and artifacts from the local fishing history.

Planning your visit

Katwijk aan Zee was one of the Dutch fishing villages that attracted painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when artists left the studios for coastal light, working people and weather — the same impulse that produced the Hague School and the colonies at Laren and Domburg. The Katwijks Museum holds work from that artists' colony alongside the material history of the fishing community the painters came to depict.

The fishing collection covers the herring trade, the flat-bottomed bomschuit boats that were hauled directly onto the beach because Katwijk had no harbour, the lifeboat service, and the domestic life of families dependent on the sea. Photographs and objects document a working village that has since become a resort.

The two halves illuminate each other: the paintings romanticise a life the artefacts show as hard.

Katwijk sits on the coast near Leiden, easily reached from Amsterdam or The Hague. Allow an hour. The main booking is an entrance ticket. Current availability is shown below.