Pierre Cuypers
Pierre Cuypers designed the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Central Station and a great many Catholic churches. His Gothic Revival in red brick became almost a national style in the 19th-century Netherlands.
Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers was born in 1827 in Roermond in Limburg into a Catholic family. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and in 1850 became city architect of Roermond. There he set up a workshop for church art that produced sculpture, furniture and stained glass. He was influenced by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and by the English Gothic Revival, and he wanted to revive the crafts and building arts of the Middle Ages.
Cuypers designed a great many churches in the Netherlands, many of them in red brick and with tall towers, after Catholics had regained the right to organise in 1853. In 1865 he moved to Amsterdam. He won the commissions for the Rijksmuseum, built in 1876–1885, and Amsterdam Central Station, 1881–1889. Both buildings combine Gothic and Dutch Renaissance in brick and stone and are richly decorated with sculpture and tiles that tell the country’s history. He also restored castles and churches, among them De Haar castle.
Cuypers died in 1921 in Roermond, to which he had returned. He is regarded as the most important 19th-century architect in the Netherlands, and his buildings still shape the townscape of Amsterdam. Protestants criticised him for turning the nation’s museum into a Catholic cathedral, but his ideas about honest construction and craftsmanship influenced the next generation, among them Hendrik Petrus Berlage, who led Dutch architecture towards modernism.