Girl with a Pearl Earring

Trip Start Aug 17, 2005
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Trip End Jun 2006


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Flag of Netherlands  ,
Saturday, February 4, 2006

Today we travelled to The Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague to see the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painting and several others by famous Dutch artists. The Maritshuis was actually once a mansion built in the 1600s for a wealthy Dutch man and his family. Over the generations, the mansion was past down through royal families and eventually burned in a fire in the 1700's. In the 1800's the Dutch state purchased and restored the mansion and decided to use it as a museum to house royal paintings. All right everyone, that was your history lesson for the day! Now on to what we thought about it...

We really liked this museum, for one, because it was in a unique setting (a mansion), and two, because it was actually quite small. The paintings themselves are only on one level of the mansion and spaced between five different rooms. It's not that we don't like art(because we really do), we just don't appreciate it as much as we should because we are (definitely) NOT artists and often don't know what heck we are looking at 01 The Mauritshuis
01 The Mauritshuis
 ! Hence, our attention span at art museums tends to be on the short side. But at this museum, it was perfect! Each room housed paintings from a different artist and time period. The most famous painting in the museum is obviously the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer. We both really liked the painting, but when we finally saw it in person we agreed that it was a little smaller than we were expecting (similar to the Mona Lisa). Many of our other favorite paintings were by the artist Rembrant. He has MANY famous paintings and is known best for his ability to shed light on his subjects of focus.

After visiting the museum, we walked around the downtown and ate at a nearby restaurant. We then headed back to our apartment for an fun-filled night of watching movies on our laptop- Exciting!!!
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