Mauritshuis

The house was built in the 1640s for Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, a cousin of the Dutch ruling family who had spent seven years governing the Dutch colony in Brazil and came home rich enough to raise a small classical palace beside the government pond in The Hague. His architects, Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post, gave it the calm symmetry that would shape Dutch grand building for a century.

Some of that wealth came from the sugar plantations and the trade in enslaved people that the colony ran, a history the museum now states openly on its walls.

Today the rooms hold one of the finest small collections of the Dutch Golden Age. This is where you stand before Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, her turned head and single earring caught against the dark, and a few rooms away his cool View of Delft. Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp lays a dissected arm open before a ring of surgeons, and Carel Fabritius's tiny Goldfinch sits chained to its perch, a picture that survived the Delft gunpowder explosion that killed its painter in 1654.