Over the years, collections continued to grow and museum insight continued to expand, and so the Rijksmuseum building underwent many changes. Rooms were added to the south-west side of the building between 1904 and 1916 (now the Philips wing) to house the collection of 19th-century paintings donated to the museum by Mr and Mrs Drucker-Fraser. In the 1950s and 1960s, the two original courtyards were covered and renovated to create more rooms.
In 1927, while Schmidt-Degener was Managing Director, the Netherlands Museum was split to form the departments of Dutch History and Sculpture & Applied Art. These departments were moved to separate parts of the building after 1945. The arrival of a collection donated by the Association of Friends of Asian Art in the 1950s resulted in the creation of the Asian Art department.
The 1970s saw record numbers of visitors of almost one-and-a-half million per year, and the building gradually started to fall short of modern requirements.