Where to buy art in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, or have it painted

Alongside the galleries and shops, CBS counts 95 art-lending centres, where you can borrow a work by a regional artist before deciding. What separates the sellers is size, palette and how much of the piece you can choose:

Read the right-hand column first: a framed print for a guest room is a shop purchase; a canvas for the long living-room wall of a Gooi villa, or twelve matching paintings for an office floor, is not. The wider picture is in our Netherlands wall art guide.

Looking at art in person is a Dutch habit: in 2024, 18% of residents visited an artist’s studio, a gallery or an exhibition space. In Amsterdam, contemporary galleries cluster in the Jordaan, and the dealers of the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, by the Rijksmuseum, sell older paintings and antiques. The Affordable Art Fair each autumn, Art Rotterdam and TEFAF Maastricht each March bring many galleries under one roof, and open-studio weekends let you meet the painter.

Taste is shifting: the head of a major auction house in the Netherlands said in 2025 that art now ‘must be Instagrammable and figurative’, and that figurative painting has become the trend nobody expected. A gallery sells the size the artist chose; if the piece you love is too small for the wall, ask about a commission from the artist, and give the walls around it canvases painted in the same palette.

Much Dutch wall art is now chosen on a screen, and one Dutch home site recommends a hand-painted canvas over a print behind glass for more depth and character. Three kinds of listing look alike as thumbnails:

• ‘Canvas schilderij’ or ‘XXL’: often a print on canvas, sometimes with brushed gel on top to imitate texture.
• ‘Handgeschilderd’: painted by hand, usually a stock design repeated in fixed sizes.
• ‘Uniek’ or ‘origineel’: a one-off by a named artist, sold at the size it was painted.

Ask for a close photograph in side light: brushwork throws small, uneven shadows, while a print stays flat or repeats one embossed pattern. Then ask whether the canvas comes from stock or is painted for you. With iHomeArt it is always painted for you and nothing is printed; you see your own canvas in photographs or video at each stage, side-lit if you ask. See our textured paintings.

Two of the reasons Dutch shoppers give for returns fit paintings exactly: the item arrived damaged (26%), or looked different in reality than online (19%).

Before you buy stock, tape the canvas’s width and height on the wall. When you commission, ask what you will see before it ships: with us, photographs or video at every stage and a final photograph you approve before dispatch, which is why finished pieces are not returnable. Transit damage is rare, under 0.01% of pieces; if it happens, we take it up with the carrier and work out a solution with you, such as a replacement or a refund.

The Dutch live with their old masters: in 2024, 31% of residents visited an art or design museum, and the museum shops sell posters of the famous canvases. A hand-painted reproduction is a different object, with brushwork you can see and a size chosen for your wall, in oil if you want a museum picture’s depth (acrylic is our standard). Works out of copyright, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, the Golden Age flower painters and Van Gogh, can be painted freely; for a work still in copyright, as much 20th-century art is, we need the rights holder’s permission first.

The other route is a new painting in the old idiom. Soho House Amsterdam hangs contemporary work inspired by Dutch still life and vanitas painting in its restaurant; a new still life, or a polder under a big sky in your own colours, carries the same reference without copying anyone. Browse our still lifes and landscapes.

The Dutch design trade is large: the BNI, the association of interior architects, has more than 300 members. Designers and stylists source art in three places: trade-only wholesale halls for decorative canvases and prints by the piece, mostly in standard sizes; galleries and art advisers for named works; and, where a villa, hotel or office floor needs a dozen pieces in one palette at sizes taken from the elevations, a studio that paints to order.

Put the art on the first product list, not the last: one Dutch interior studio orders products only once its client has paid, and a painted canvas needs its own time after that. We paint to your mood board and drawings, one sample canvas first if you want it, and label every canvas by room or position with a packing list. See art for interior designers; for a décor shop or framer, wholesale for galleries and framers; for an art-lending service, stock to own outright.

Buying for the home from abroad is ordinary now: 17% of Dutch online Home & Living purchases went to foreign webshops in 2025, up from 8% in 2021. Start with the wall: we suggest a size and a shortlist from some 1,300 designs, or design a piece for your project. You pay half upfront and half once you approve the final photograph.

Choose the finish for the route into the room. Stretched or framed pieces arrive ready to hang, and heavily textured work always travels that way, with the shipping cost confirmed before dispatch. Walls room by room are in Dutch homes.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.