It houses a world-famous collection of art. With paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, including work by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Jan Steen and Frans Hals. The collection also offers an overview of Dutch and Flemish painting from 1400 to 1800. With masterpieces by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Rubens, Van Dyck, Cornelis Troost and Adriaen Coorte. The museum also owns several works by the 16th-century German artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger. This grand collection has been housed for nearly 200 years in the Mauritshuis, a 17th-century palace on the Hofvijver in The Hague.
The world famous painting: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, will then be back in Holland after a tour in Japan and the US.
This painting and some fifty other important paintings from the collection went on tour to Japan; exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Kobe City Museum.
Exhibitions in the United States will be at the Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and at the Frick Collection in New York.
Much of the rest of the collection can be seen at the Gemeentemuseum/Municipalmuseum in The Hague under the title of: Masters from the Mauritshuis. Favourites such as The Bull by Paulus Potter, View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer and Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt will be on display there, along with more than a hundred other works from the Mauritshuis, until mid-2014.
Several other museums in the Netherlands and Belgium are also benefiting from a temporary trove of works from the Mauritshuis. For example, Amsterdam portraits will be at the Amsterdam Museum, and works related to the Dutch royal house will be at Paleis het Loo in Apeldoorn. 150 paintings from the collection will be on permanent display at the Galerij Prins Willem V in Buitenhof square in the centre of The Hague.
By mid-2014, all the paintings will be back in Het Mauritshuis in The Hague.
