Hotel Spaander & the Volendam Artists' Colony

A Hotel That Is Also a Gallery

Right on the Dijk, facing the harbour, stands Hotel Spaander - founded in 1881 and one of the few places in the Netherlands where the building's own history is hung, frame by frame, on its walls. Over its first decades the hotel filled with painters from across Europe and the United States, many of whom settled their bills with their own canvases. The result is a collection of more than 1,400 paintings and works on paper, still displayed throughout the public rooms, corridors and stairwells today. You do not need a ticket to see them: walk in for a coffee, a meal or a stay, and the "museum" surrounds you.

Leendert and Aaltje Spaander

The hotel was the creation of Leendert Spaander, who opened it in 1881, and his wife Aaltje. As Volendam became a magnet for artists, the Spaander household became their base - somewhere to lodge, eat, store equipment and find local people willing to sit as models. The couple's daughters grew up among this stream of foreign painters; several modelled for the visiting artists, and some married them, threading the family directly into the story of the colony. The hospitality of the Spaanders, as much as the harbour itself, is why so many painters stayed long enough to leave work behind.

Why Volendam Drew the Painters

Volendam was one node in a much wider phenomenon: across Europe and America, artists gathered in rural villages to form artists' colonies, from Barbizon in France to Skagen in Denmark and Newlyn in England. Volendam, with its costumes and its harbour, became the Dutch destination on that circuit, and Hotel Spaander was its clubhouse.

The Visitors

Painters arrived from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Britain, the United States and beyond, some passing through for a season and others returning year after year. The guest list over the decades reportedly ran into the hundreds, and the walls accumulated portraits of the Spaander daughters, harbour scenes, fishing boats and studies of villagers in costume. The signatures span a remarkable range of nationalities, which is part of what makes the collection unusual: it is not one school but a cross-section of the international artists who treated Volendam as a subject.

The Hotel Today

From the Harbour to the Rijksmuseum

The Volendam colony was not an isolated curiosity. The same fascination with the village's light, costume and fishing life produced works that hang far beyond the hotel. Volendam and the wider Zuiderzee fishing villages were painted by artists whose work entered major Dutch collections, and Volendam's chapter overlaps with the world of the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where Dutch realist and Impressionist-era painting of this period is shown. Seeing the Spaander collection and then those national museums gives you both ends of the story: the working hotel where the pictures were painted and paid as currency, and the canonised art history they sit alongside.

To go deeper into Volendam's costume, fishing heritage and the colony itself, the local museum is the natural next stop.

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