The house on the picked up a nickname in the seventeenth century, and it was not meant kindly. Directors of the called it the Sugar Palace.
had it built while he was on the other side of the ocean, serving as governor of . That colony ran on sugar, and the sugar ran on the labour of enslaved Africans. His salary alone cannot account for what the house cost, and where the rest of the money came from is still being traced in the archives. He returned in 1644 to a finished building and lived in it only briefly.
Almost nothing he brought back has survived. On the evening of the twenty-second of December 1704 a careless servant started a fire that gutted the entire interior. What hangs inside today comes from a completely different collection, the one assembled by the .
The most famous painting arrived much later. In 1881 a collector named bought a filthy canvas at a Hague auction for two guilders, plus thirty cents in auction fees. Cleaning revealed a signature underneath. It has hung here since 1902.
The next stop stands on the far side of the Hofvijver: the little tower at the water's edge, seen best from the Lange Vijverberg.
Sources. Story: Mauritshuis, eigen pagina's over Johan Maurits en de geschiedenis van het gebouw; Haagse Historie, Het bewogen beeld van Johan Maurits; De Huisvriend 1897 over de brand van 22 december 1704; provenance Meisje met de parel. De precieze financiering van de bouw is onderwerp van lopend archiefonderzoek en nog te verifieren. Photos: Source photo: "Foto Wolfgang Pehlemann" direkt unter dem Bild mit Angabe "erweiterte Lizenz CC-by-sa V. 3.0", wobei der Nutzer für dessen Nutzung a) Rechte oder Ansprüche Dritter prüfen und verantwortlich beachten sowie b) Motivveränderungen durch ihn als solche mit angeben muss., CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
