Mauritshuis Den Haag: Paintings

The author

Magdi Tóth-Ubbens was a curator at the Mauritshuis and a scholar of its holdings — she also helped produce the technical study Rembrandt in the Mauritshuis (1978). She writes here from inside the institution, with the authority of someone who knew the pictures intimately.

The museum

The Mauritshuis, housed in a seventeenth-century mansion in The Hague, holds the Royal Cabinet of Paintings — a relatively small collection of overwhelmingly high quality, centered on the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age. Its stars include Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch — a concentration of masterpieces few museums of any size can match.

How to read it

As a collection guide of its period — an authoritative walk through the paintings rather than a work of new interpretation. Museum handbooks like this date in their design and attributions but remain useful records of a great collection and warm mementos of a visit.

For more context

The Mauritshuis's own more recent scholarly catalogues (Broos and Buvelot); and general histories of Dutch Golden Age painting.

Sources

• Mauritshuis (official)
• Mauritshuis (Wikipedia)
• Book listing