Gallery Prince Willem V

Step into the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof and there is hardly any bare wall left. The paintings hang frame to frame, from low on the wall almost to the ceiling, big canvases in the middle and small panels packed symmetrically around them. That is how a prince's picture room looked in the 18th century, and this single long hall, about 25 metres from end to end, has been arranged to look that way again.

It was built for Prince William V of Orange, the stadholder who headed the Dutch Republic. In 1774 he had two houses on the Buitenhof, next to the old prison gate called the Gevangenpoort, turned into a gallery for his paintings, and visitors from outside the court could get in with a pass from the porter. It is often called the first museum in the Netherlands open to the public. In 1795 French armies confiscated the collection and sent it to the Louvre. Much of it came back after Napoleon's defeat, and in 1822 the pictures moved to the Mauritshuis, the royal picture gallery on the far side of the Hofvijver, the pond beside the Dutch parliament.

The Mauritshuis still runs the gallery, and the roughly 150 paintings on its walls belong to its collection. Among them are Frans Snyders' Still Life with Huntsman, which William V bought in 1768, and Gerard van Honthorst's life-size double portrait of the stadholder Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia of Solms. A combined ticket covers both buildings, and the way in is through the Gevangenpoort.