Europe > Netherlands > South Holland > The Hague > Painting > Articles > Den Haag - Unexpected art treasures in an overlooked city

Many visitors to Holland think only of the finger-lickin’ pleasures of Amsterdam. The name of Den Haag brings to mind the International Court of Justice, perhaps the Dutch Parliament in session, and the … um, not much else. Yet this overlooked city has plenty of laid-back charm. Its art collections, in particular, make a fascinating day's viewing.

The Royal Picture Cabinet collection fills only two floors of the Mauritshuis, a smallish 17th-century town house - but what a collection! Highlights are Vermeer’s open-faced Girl with the Pearl and his light-and-shade View of Delft painted in 1658; Frans Hals’s Laughing Boy with bunny teeth and tousled hair; a superb portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger of a thoughtful Robert Cheseman, falconer to King Henry VIII; and a huge Young Bull by Paulus Potter with marvellous details of animal hair, leaves and flowers. Rembrandt’s famous early study, the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), radiated a luminous glow, and there is a wonderful self-portrait of the artist in a baggy black hat.

Up a dark spiral stair at 65 Zeestraat you'll find an oddity of the 19th century art world that is reckoned the finest survivor of its kind - Hendrik Mesdag’s immense 1881 panorama of the nearby seaside village of Scheveningen. This monster of a cylindrical painting, almost 400 feet long and 46 feet high, shows square-built bomschuit boats, riders and strollers on the beach, the red-roofed village with its first few holiday buildings already standing, an enormous green-blue North Sea out west, and inland the spires of Den Haag separated from Scheveningen by a wide expanse of green and silver dunes.

In the Gemeentemuseum, a very striking pale brick 1930s building with heavy chrome and brass doors that is an art object in itself, hangs Piet Mondriaan’s red, blue, yellow and white lozenge-shaped painting Victory Boogie Woogie. The museum recently paid £25 million for this; amateur daubers may feel they could have just as well if only they'd had a free weekend ...

• More from Christopher Somerville
• More on the same theme