designed this museum as his final major commission and died in 1934, a year before it opened. He laid out a route from room to room in yellow brick, with daylight dropping in from above. Museum architects came from all over to see how he had solved it.
Inside hangs the largest collection in the world, from early Dutch windmills to the bare rectangles that made his name. The best known canvas is , which he was working on when he died in New York in 1944. It stayed unfinished: pieces of coloured tape he kept shifting around are still stuck to the surface.
In 1998 bought the painting for eighty million and placed it in the museum on long-term loan. That brought parliamentary questions, furious letters to newspapers and weeks of argument over whether an unfinished canvas could be worth such a sum. It has hung here quietly ever since.
Head into the city afterwards with one of our walks through The Hague.
Sources. Story: Kunstmuseum Den Haag (kunstmuseum.nl) on Berlage's building and the Mondrian collection. The purchase of Victory Boogie Woogie: De Nederlandsche Bank and the Dutch parliamentary records from 1998. Photos: Source photo: Roel Wijnants, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
