A Square with Imaginary Buildings

This square, lined with palaces and loggias that never stood anywhere, was painted on a sheet of copper in 1614. Hendrick van Steenwijck signed and dated it just left of centre, below the balustrade.

The journey of the picture is better documented than the city it shows. By 1745 it belonged to Prince William IV of Orange, and it passed to his son William V, the last stadholder, who opened his picture gallery on the Buitenhof in The Hague to visitors in 1774. When French revolutionary troops entered the Dutch Republic in 1795, the stadholder's paintings were carried off to Paris and this one went to the Louvre. It came back after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, and from 1816 it was on show in the Gallery Prince Willem V. It belongs to the Mauritshuis, which took over the royal pictures in 1822, and today it hangs in that same gallery.