While larger museums may contain bigger and better collections of 17th-century Dutch art, the Mauritshuis offers an excellent survey of all the genres that artists of the Dutch Golden Age so miraculously mastered.

WSJ: de Young Museum: More Than Just the Girl

The exhibition, officially titled Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis at the de Young also features 34 other paintings by Dutch Golden Age masters, including works by Rembrandt, Peiter Claesz, Jacob van Ruisdael and Frans Hals.

BBC: Going Dutch in San Francisco

In Gerrit Berckheyde's painting of the "civic center" of The Hague (c. 1690), the artist erased foreground structures in order to depict the stately buildings along two sides of the Court Pond, including the back of the Mauritshuis itself.

WSJ: de Young Museum: More Than Just the Girl

It was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the wedding of the Winter King and Queen that I came to be in the Hague last week, walking through heavy snow past the Mauritshuis to the grand opening of a glorious exhibition of 17th Century paintings of the couple and their family.

BBC: A Point of View: The Winter Queen of Bohemia

Their solution was to yield most of the canvas or panel to the gray, fog-and cloud-filled sky (curator Emilie Gordenker, director of the Mauritshuis, calls them "our Dutch mountains"), with blue openings torn into the gray here and there so that spots of sunlight could illuminate parts of the land or water below.

WSJ: de Young Museum: More Than Just the Girl