Mauritshuis
Photo: Mauritshuis Museum — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Mauritshuis in The Hague houses over 200 masterpieces from the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, including Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ and Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’.
Planning your visit
The Mauritshuis is small enough to see properly in two hours and holds a concentration of masterpieces that larger museums cannot match. It occupies a seventeenth-century townhouse beside the Binnenhof, built for a Dutch count who financed it partly through the Brazilian sugar and slave trade — a history the museum now acknowledges.
Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is the reason most people come, and it repays the visit: smaller than expected, and the effect of the lit face against the dark ground does not survive reproduction. The View of Delft hangs nearby, along with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp and his late self-portrait, Fabritius's Goldfinch, Jan Steen, Potter's Young Bull and Holbein.
The intimacy is the point. These are domestic-scale rooms with wooden floors and daylight, closer to how the paintings were originally seen than any modern gallery.
The Hague is twenty minutes from Rotterdam and under an hour from Amsterdam. Timed tickets are advisable. Bookable options include private guided tours. Current availability is shown below.
Before you book
Where is Mauritshuis?
Mauritshuis is in The Hague, Netherlands. The map on this page marks its exact location.
Do I need to book Mauritshuis in advance?
Private tours are arranged for a set date and time, so they need booking in advance.
