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The house
John Maurice of Nassau built the house between 1636 and 1641
In 1631 John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, bought a plot bordering the Binnenhof and the Hofvijver pond. The Mauritshuis was built there between 1636 and 1641, during his governorship of Dutch Brazil, by Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post. The two-storey building is strictly symmetrical.
Occupation
During the occupation it was a hideout, and the art was stored away
During the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945, people evading Nazi slave labour hid in the attic and basement, close to Nazi offices in the building. The collection, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, spent two years in a bombproof bunker below the museum, then moved to the St Pietersberg caves.
A museum
The state bought the house in 1820 for the Royal Cabinet of Paintings
An art gallery open to the public was formed in 1774 in what is now the Prince William V Gallery. The French seized that collection in 1795, and it was only partially recovered in 1808. In 1820 the Dutch state bought the Mauritshuis to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, which opened to the public in 1822.
The paintings
The collection holds almost 800 paintings, mostly Dutch and Flemish
The current collection consists of almost 800 paintings and focuses on Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Pieter Brueghel, Paulus Potter, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, Johannes Vermeer and Rogier van der Weyden. The expanded museum reopened on 27 June 2014.
The prince
The museum now explains the prince's part in the slave trade
In 1664 the prince ordered a marble bust of himself. A plastic copy stood in the museum foyer from 1986 until it was removed in 2017, amid controversy over the Netherlands' colonial history. The museum has since published a page on the prince, which highlights his key role in the slave trade in Dutch Brazil.
Day 6, afternoon
It comes after Nieuwe Kerk. Then Binnenhof.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Mauritshuis, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.