A larger and later Amsterdam church by Cuijpers, the Maria Magdalenakerk in the Zaanstraat of 1887, is considerably more impressive, both inside and out. Occupying one of those narrow triangular sites so often assigned to important urban churches in this period, the exterior builds up grandly to the rather severe crossing tower at the rear. Inside, Cuijpers made the most of the difficulties of the site also. The east end is conventionally Gothic in plan, and the choir here is brick-vaulted, as is the Vondelkerk throughout. But the taller nave, covered with a wooden roof of ogival section, is much more effective spatially because of the way it is widened by triangular elements at the front where the aisles are cut off owing to the narrowing of the site (Plate 101B). The later painted decorations in this church are harmonious in tone with the brickwork, and the whole has a breadth of attack comparable to some of the best English churches of the seventies, such as Pearson’s in Kilburn or Edmund Scott’s St Bartholomew’s, Brighton, without resembling any of them very much. Curiously enough for so dedicated a church-builder, Cuijpers’s secular work is more conspicuous, and hence better known, than are his churches. The two largest and most prominent nineteenth-century buildings of Amsterdam are both by him. In these, the Rijksmuseum built in 1877-85 (Plate 101C) and the Central Station of 1881-9, he moved away from the emulation of thirteenth- or fourteenth-century ecclesiastical Gothic towards a more elastic sixteenth-century sort of design, rather similar to the English mode of these decades known as ‘Pont Street Dutch’ (see Chapter 12). The similarity to the Northern Renaissance mode of this period in Germany is nearly as great, as also to such somewhat later Scandinavian buildings as Clason’s Northern Museum in Stockholm and Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen (Plate 173A). But Cuijpers’s touch is lighter than that of the Germans, and his precedent rather more Late Gothic than Mannerist, while his two chief works precede those that they most resemble in Sweden and Denmark by a decade or more. In both cases the frank incorporation of iron-and-glass elements is notable, a vast shed at the station and two almost equally vast covered courts in the museum. Above all, being the Gothic Revivalist he was, Cuijpers saw to it that the craftsmanship was excellent throughout; while his handling of scale, though ambiguous as in much work of these decades everywhere, is surprisingly successful. Both are very large buildings, placed in isolation where they can be seen from a distance and with carefully studied silhouettes varied by towers and other skyline features; yet the membering is delicate and almost domestic, quite as in the rather comparable English work of George (Plate 104B) or Collcutt (see Chapter 12).