Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery

When the Mauritshuis in The Hague closed for an extensive two-year renovation in April 2012, the museum took the opportunity to send 35 of its greatest Dutch Golden Age masterpieces on a world tour, the collection’s first major international loan in nearly thirty years. The paintings traveled first to Japan, where shows at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Kobe City Museum drew more than 1.1 million visitors, before crossing to the United States for three stops spanning the first three quarters of 2013.

The High Museum of Art presented the American summer stop, titled Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery, from June 22 through September 29, 2013. The selection of 35 works included paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, and Carel Fabritius (represented by his celebrated The Goldfinch), with Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring serving as the centrepiece and the face of all promotional materials. The exhibition had opened earlier that year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a smaller selection of ten masterpieces subsequently appeared at the Frick Collection in New York from October 2013 into January 2014.

Across all its venues the world tour attracted more than 2.2 million visitors. The income generated contributed directly to funding the Mauritshuis renovation, which reunited the collection in a refurbished and expanded building when the museum reopened in June 2014. For many visitors in Atlanta the exhibition offered a rare opportunity to see a work that is seldom lent abroad.