Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis

The Mauritshuis in The Hague closed its doors in 2012 for a major two-year renovation that would nearly double its available floor space by connecting the historic seventeenth-century palace to the adjacent Sociëteit De Witte building via a new underground foyer. Rather than simply shutter its collection, the museum organised an international touring exhibition of approximately fifty highlights, with proceeds from the tour helping to fund the construction work. The first leg of that tour opened at the newly reopened Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno on 30 June 2012 and ran through 17 September, marking a landmark occasion: the first time Girl with a Pearl Earring had ever been exhibited in Japan.

The Tokyo presentation brought together some of the most celebrated works in the Mauritshuis collection, spanning Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century. Six paintings by Rembrandt were included, among them his late Self-Portrait. Carel Fabritius was represented by The Goldfinch, Jan Steen by As the Old Sing, So Twitter the Young and Girl Eating Oysters, and Frans Hals by Laughing Boy. Works by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jan Brueghel the Elder completed a survey of the Golden Age tradition that the Mauritshuis has long embodied. Vermeer contributed two paintings: the iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring, whose gaze over the shoulder made it the undisputed centrepiece of the tour, and the early Diana and Her Companions, an unusual mythological composition that shows a different range of the artist’s ambitions.

The exhibition drew approximately 1.2 million visitors in Tokyo alone, making it one of the most attended art shows in the world that year. After closing in September, the exhibition moved to the Kobe City Museum, where it remained until early 2013, adding a further substantial audience before the Japanese leg concluded. Together the two Japanese venues attracted more than 1.1 million visitors, and the full international tour (which continued to the United States and later Italy) reached a total of some 2.2 million people before the Mauritshuis reopened in The Hague on 27 June 2014.