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The Prince William V Gallery, located at Buitenhof in The Hague, was built in 1774 specifically to house the painting collection of Stadholder William V, prince of Orange-Nassau. Because it was open to the public, the painting gallery is regarded as one of the first museums in the Netherlands. Precisely twenty-one years after it opened, the entire collection was looted by French soldiers and taken to Paris as the spoils of war. Fortunately, the Netherlands was able to secure the return of the most important paintings twenty years later, and these make up the nucleus of the Mauritshuis collection since 1822. Since 1987, the Gallery is administered by the Mauritshuis and displays around 150 paintings from that museum’s collection. It was restored in 2010 and decorated as much as possible in the original style. The walls of the main hall are covered with paintings right up to the ceiling, their frames almost touching, exactly as they were displayed in the eighteenth century.

The masterpieces on view in the Gallery include Jan Steen’s Tooth-Puller, Van Hoogstraten’s Perspective View with a Woman Reading a Letter, Van Mieris’s A Boy Blowing Bubbles, Portrait of a Young Woman by Rubens (and studio), and Voskuyl’s remarkable self-portrait.

Quentin Buvelot, Senior Curator (November 2023)