The Royal Cabinet of Paintings at the Mauritshuis is one of the great small museums of Europe — a 17th-century patrician house on the Hofvijver that holds a disproportionately powerful collection of Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painting. The building itself, constructed in the 1630s for Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, is beautiful: a small palace with painted ceilings and intimate rooms where the paintings hang at eye level and at close quarters.
The collection includes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, two further Vermeers, Holbein portraits, and works by Rubens, Jan Steen, and Frans Hals. With around 800 works in total, there is no padding — everything here was chosen for quality. It is a museum you can cover in two to three hours and feel genuinely satisfied, rather than exhausted. The location, directly facing the Binnenhof across the Hofvijver, makes it easy to combine with a walk through the government quarter.