Using more than 100 artworks, you take a walk through the night at a time when it was still truly dark. You begin at dusk and journey into the darkness, moving toward the break of dawn. Along the way, you discover a world filled with tranquil moonlit landscapes, cheerful night owls, and dramatic witches’ sabbaths.

Seventeenth-century artists were anything but night-blind. Night scenes flourished into a fully developed artistic genre. Paintings, prints, and drawings depicting the nighttime hours became so popular that they were given special names, such as maneschijntjes (“moonlight scenes”) and brantjes (“firelight scenes”). Some artists, such as Gerrit Dou and Gesina ter Borch, treated night scenes as an occasional excursion, while others, including Aert van der Neer and Egbert van der Poel, truly specialized in them.

These artworks reveal that the night possessed a unique beauty. It was not dull or lifeless, but fascinating and vibrant. And dark. From Dusk Till Dawn shows how that darkness invites reflection on our own overly illuminated world and its consequences for both people and animals. In a special “star room,” visitors can experience just how dramatically the number of visible stars in our country has declined since the seventeenth century.

You do not make the journey through From Dusk Till Dawn alone. Through an audio-guided “podwalk,” you are accompanied by several well-informed seventeenth-century night guides. They tell you about life during the small hours of the night as well as about the artists who depicted the nocturnal world.

At times intimate, at times lively, and often surprisingly relevant to the present day, From Dusk Till Dawn sheds light for the first time on an unjustly overlooked aspect of our history. It is an experience that is anything but sleep-inducing.