Pieter Post

The Mauritshuis in The Hague, the small palace that now holds Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' and Rembrandt's early anatomy lesson, was built in the 1630s as a private house. One of the two architects who designed it was Pieter Post.

Post worked in the sober, balanced style known as Dutch classicism, which he helped shape alongside the older architect Jacob van Campen. Instead of heavy ornament, they used plain brick, clean pilasters and quiet symmetry, a Protestant restraint that came to define the look of the Dutch Golden Age. The house was commissioned by Johan Maurits of Nassau, the count who governed the Dutch colony in Brazil, and it still carries his name.

Post went on to become the official architect to the House of Orange, designing town halls, country houses and the palace of Huis ten Bosch outside The Hague. He had trained first as a painter, and a few early battle scenes and landscapes by his hand survive. He died in The Hague in 1669.