Mauritshuis

The Mauritshuis, officially the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, is a museum in The Hague, in the Netherlands. Its name means roughly "House of Maurice" and refers to Count John Maurice of Nassau, for whom the building was erected in 1640 while he governed Dutch Brazil, a short-lived Dutch possession in Pernambuco. Designed in the Dutch Baroque, or Dutch Classicist, style by Jacob Van Campen and Pieter Post, the palace stands on the Hofvijver, close to the Binnenhof, the seat of the Dutch parliament. It became a museum in 1822 to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings. After decades under state management, it was privatised in 1995: a foundation now looks after the collection, which is lent on a long-term basis, while the state-owned building is rented by the museum.

The collection concentrates on seventeenth-century painting, the Dutch Golden Age, though it also holds earlier Flemish and Italian works. The museum is best known for several masterpieces by Rembrandt, such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, and for three of the very few surviving paintings by Johannes Vermeer, among them Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft. Other artists well represented on the website include Frans Hals, Carel Fabritius, whose The Goldfinch gave its name to Donna Tartt's novel, Jan Steen, Gerrit Dou, Judith Leyster, Peter Paul Rubens and Rogier van der Weyden. The galleries are small and intimate, with parquet floors and silk-lined walls.

Between 2012 and 2014 the museum closed for a renovation and extension costing about 31 million euros. A neighbouring building, unused until then, was joined to the palace by an underground passage, and the old rooms were restored, including paintings by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. During the closure, part of the collection was shown in another museum in the city, and some famous works travelled abroad. It reopened on 27 June 2014.