The story
One painting in this 18th-century house on the Lange Vijverberg, the street along the Hofvijver pond in the centre of The Hague, spent generations in two pieces. Jan Steen's Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah, a scene from the biblical Book of Tobit, was cut in half in the 19th century. Abraham Bredius owned the half with the angel. The half with the marriage bed was later claimed by the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, the Amsterdam dealer who fled the Netherlands in 1940. The halves were rejoined in the 1990s, and in 2011 the city of The Hague reached a settlement with the heir so the picture could stay here in one piece.
Bredius was one of the leading Dutch art historians of his day, director of the Mauritshuis for 20 years and a collector with an eye for lesser-known 17th-century painters. In 1937 he also publicly hailed a forged Vermeer by Han van Meegeren as genuine. He moved to Monaco in 1924 and left about 200 works to The Hague when he died in 1946. They were first shown in a house on the Prinsegracht, until the city closed that museum in 1985 to save money. A foundation of local art lovers raised funds by touring the collection in the United States and Japan, and reopened it here in 1990.
Elsewhere in the house are a Head of Christ attributed to Rembrandt, a self-portrait by Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of Rembrandt's pupils, and a sketchbook by the landscape painter Jan van Goyen, the only one of his known to survive intact. Cases of Amsterdam silver from three centuries fill out the rooms.
