On the last day of last year, I left my hotel in the centre of Den Haag and walked a short distance to Mauritshuis. Built in the mid-seventeenth century, initially as a splendid family home in the city centre, it has for the past two-hundred years housed first the Dutch royal and now the Dutch state art collection, which includes very impressive paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer, Fabritius’s beautiful small painting, The Goldfinch, along with a large collection of other works. It is a wonderful museum, where I spent two enjoyable hours looking closely at these great artworks. It is also a rather traditional space, with paintings displayed in rather traditional ways.
On leaving Mauritshuis, I walked north-east through the Haagse Bos for around an hour, before turning north into parkland at the outer edge of the city, until I reached the Museum Voorlinden. This very modern building opened a decade ago and houses the largest private art collection in the Netherlands. While there are some good paintings hanging on the walls, perhaps more impressive are some of the sculptural installations that were made specifically for the site. There is a large corten-steel structure by Richard Serra, comprising six standing curved plates, each around 5 metres high, whose combined weight is more than 200 tons. Walking in between these plates along a maze-like pathway, that narrows and widens alternately, creates rapidly changing feelings of claustrophobia and safety. After passing through the work, visitors can climb a staircase and look down on the entire structure, seeing the sculpture from above now that they have escaped from within.
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