LONDON: One of Britain’s favourite art galleries has just locked its doors, and will stay shut for the next five years. The museum, home of many of the UK’s best loved paintings, including works by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Frans Hals, is visited by more than 250,000 people from the UK every year, more than many leading British galleries — but is located across the North Sea: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

British visitors are crucial to the museum’s finances, which are more perilous since privatization of the Dutch museum sector eight years ago. Britons and Americans each contribute 25 per cent of its roughly million visitors a year, followed by the Japanese and French — with Dutch visitors trailing a long way down the list.

The director, Ronald de Leeuw, is anxious to remind his overseas visitors that a mini-museum, displaying 400 of the Rijksmuseum’s greatest hits, opened on Dec 20.

It includes one of the most famous paintings in the world, Rembrandt’s Night Watch — Van Gogh said it alone was worth the visit to Amsterdam — and the Vermeers for which visitors queued around the block at a recent exhibition in the National Gallery in London.

Dr de Leeuw admitted many visitors may find The Masterpieces display, which can be relished in about 90 minutes, more appealing than the sprawling main museum, where some visitors have lost the will to live long before reaching The Kitchen Maid or the Rembrandt self-portraits.

The main museum is not due to re-open until 2008, after rebuilding which will cost more than euros 250 million.

The project was already one of the most complex in any of the world’s great museums when the disastrous extent to which the building had been stuffed with asbestos in a series of alterations since the second world war was realized.

Staff offices, in a rabbit warren of partitioned basements, were particularly badly affected: some of the conservators were ordered to get out of their offices immediately one midweek afternoon last summer, and have not been able to get back in since.

The asbestos problems meant that in the past week some of the decorative art objects, including the museum’s world famous silverware and Delft pottery, were moved to the new display by staff wearing face masks and moon boots. A cavalcade of staff cars was organized to drive some of the smaller paintings round the block to their temporary home in a wing of the Victorian museum.

The museum is lending much of the rest of its vast collection to Dutch regional museums during the closure, and a major touring exhibition is heading for the United States and Japan — but not to Britain.

“Nobody in Britain thought to ask for it,” the director said.

Apart from the world famous paintings, British visitors will find many echoes in the new historical display, including the royal coat of arms from the Royal Charles, the flagship of the mid 17th century English fleet.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.