Mauritshuis
Dutch Golden Age painting in a 17th-century town palace, home to Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The Mauritshuis holds the royal cabinet of paintings, a compact collection of about 800 works from the Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft hang here, together with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, Fabritius's The Goldfinch, Jan Steen's domestic scenes and Rubens and Van Dyck portraits. The paintings are shown in the panelled rooms of a private house rather than long galleries, so most visits take about two hours.
The building was raised between 1633 and 1644 for Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, governor of Dutch Brazil, to designs by Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post. Its symmetrical brick and sandstone front with a giant order of pilasters is a defining example of Dutch Classicism. Fire gutted the interior in 1704 and it was rebuilt; the state bought it in 1820 and opened the collection to the public in 1822. A 2014 renovation added an underground passage to a neighbouring building for entrance, shop and temporary exhibitions.
Highlights
- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft
- Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
- Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch
- Dutch Classicist facade of 1644 beside the Hofvijver
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