Moments from Mauritshuis

This compact seventeenth-century townhouse on a lake in The Hague was built as a private residence for Johan Maurits, a Dutch colonial governor, and now punches so far above its physical size that its roughly eight hundred paintings include Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, alongside major Rembrandts, in a building small enough to walk in its entirety in under two hours. Because the collection is so tightly curated rather than encyclopedic, nearly every room holds something genuinely major, there's very little filler to walk past on the way to the highlights.

Girl with a Pearl Earring draws the biggest crowds by far, and the painting's small scale, it's considerably smaller than most visitors expect from its ubiquity in reproduction, means the room around it can get genuinely congested, so consider visiting right at opening if that specific painting is your priority. The house's domestic scale is worth appreciating on its own terms too: unlike the Rijksmuseum or the Louvre, you're moving through rooms genuinely sized for a seventeenth-century household, which changes how the paintings, many originally intended for private homes rather than public galleries, actually feel to stand in front of.