A day of Old Masters, Mondrian and Escher can cost the kids nothing. Each museum here lets children in free, though the age cutoff changes from door to door: under 19 at the Kunstmuseum, 12 and under at Beelden aan Zee and Voorlinden, under 7 at Escher in The Palace. Here's what we checked, from Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring to sculpture terraces in the dunes.
The Mauritshuis is a 17th-century palace on the Hofvijver pond, beside the Binnenhof, filled with Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Kids can stand in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Fabritius' Goldfinch and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
The galleries are intimate rooms with damask wallpaper, chandeliers and painted ceilings, and over 200 masterpieces are on show.
An art museum in a Berlage building, with daylit galleries of modern art, fashion and applied arts, and as many as 300 works by Piet Mondrian.
Kids head for Chambers of Wonder (Wonderkamers): in pairs, with a tablet, they play a game through themed rooms, dance with Mondrian and reach a maze where they design their own room. A kids' audio tour covers 40 works, from Monet to Van Gogh.
Panorama Mesdag is a rotunda built around one painting: a 360-degree view of the sea, beach, dunes and fishing village of Scheveningen, 114.5 meters around and 14.6 meters high, the largest painting in the Netherlands. Kids climb a spiral staircase above an artificial dune to see it as if standing on Scheveningen's highest dune in 1881.
Side galleries show more work by Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Sientje Mesdag-van Houten.
Museum Beelden aan Zee is a sculpture museum built into the dunes of Scheveningen, beneath the 1826 Pavilion Von Wied, with a view of the sea. Inside are changing exhibitions and a rotating selection from the collection, from small figures to monumental pieces.
Outside are sculpture terraces and patios, and on the boulevard 23 fairy-tale sculptures by Tom Otterness fill a large outdoor terrace.
Museum Voorlinden is a private museum of modern and contemporary art, built around the Caldic Collection, which includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Ron Mueck, Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell.
It sits on a country estate by the Wassenaar dunes, with gardens by Piet Oudolf and woods, meadows and water to walk after the galleries. The Clingenbosch sculpture garden nearby holds more than sixty modern sculptures.
The national archaeology museum of the Netherlands. Its central hall holds the Temple of Taffeh, a real Egyptian temple taken apart in Egypt and rebuilt here.
Galleries cover Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Etruscans, Rome and the Netherlands from prehistory to the Middle Ages, with mummies, sarcophagi, imperial statues and ancient jewelry. Replicas, film clips and interactive displays help kids follow along.
The Visitors Centre explains the Peace Palace, the 1913 building that houses the UN's International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. An audio tour covers the palace's history and the work of the courts inside.
The grounds are open only on guided tours: inside the palace, around the outside, or through the garden. It suits school-age kids curious about how countries resolve disputes without war.
More than 120 prints by M.C. Escher hang in the former winter palace of Queen Emma on Lange Voorhout, from Day and Night to the seven-meter Metamorphosis III.
Kids get the most from the second floor, "Through Escher's Eyes": they turn giant or tiny in a few seconds, make their own tessellation, play with impossible figures and walk an Op-art room where the artworks seem to move.
A day of Old Masters, Mondrian and Escher can cost the kids nothing. Each museum here lets children in free, though the age cutoff changes from door to door: under 19 at the Kunstmuseum, 12 and under at Beelden aan Zee and Voorlinden, under 7 at Escher in The Palace. Here's what we checked, from Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring to sculpture terraces in the dunes.
The Mauritshuis is a 17th-century palace on the Hofvijver pond, beside the Binnenhof, filled with Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Kids can stand in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Fabritius' Goldfinch and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
The galleries are intimate rooms with damask wallpaper, chandeliers and painted ceilings, and over 200 masterpieces are on show.
An art museum in a Berlage building, with daylit galleries of modern art, fashion and applied arts, and as many as 300 works by Piet Mondrian.
Kids head for Chambers of Wonder (Wonderkamers): in pairs, with a tablet, they play a game through themed rooms, dance with Mondrian and reach a maze where they design their own room. A kids' audio tour covers 40 works, from Monet to Van Gogh.
Panorama Mesdag is a rotunda built around one painting: a 360-degree view of the sea, beach, dunes and fishing village of Scheveningen, 114.5 meters around and 14.6 meters high, the largest painting in the Netherlands. Kids climb a spiral staircase above an artificial dune to see it as if standing on Scheveningen's highest dune in 1881.
Side galleries show more work by Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Sientje Mesdag-van Houten.
Museum Beelden aan Zee is a sculpture museum built into the dunes of Scheveningen, beneath the 1826 Pavilion Von Wied, with a view of the sea. Inside are changing exhibitions and a rotating selection from the collection, from small figures to monumental pieces.
Outside are sculpture terraces and patios, and on the boulevard 23 fairy-tale sculptures by Tom Otterness fill a large outdoor terrace.
Museum Voorlinden is a private museum of modern and contemporary art, built around the Caldic Collection, which includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Ron Mueck, Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell.
It sits on a country estate by the Wassenaar dunes, with gardens by Piet Oudolf and woods, meadows and water to walk after the galleries. The Clingenbosch sculpture garden nearby holds more than sixty modern sculptures.
The national archaeology museum of the Netherlands. Its central hall holds the Temple of Taffeh, a real Egyptian temple taken apart in Egypt and rebuilt here.
Galleries cover Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Etruscans, Rome and the Netherlands from prehistory to the Middle Ages, with mummies, sarcophagi, imperial statues and ancient jewelry. Replicas, film clips and interactive displays help kids follow along.
The Visitors Centre explains the Peace Palace, the 1913 building that houses the UN's International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. An audio tour covers the palace's history and the work of the courts inside.
The grounds are open only on guided tours: inside the palace, around the outside, or through the garden. It suits school-age kids curious about how countries resolve disputes without war.
More than 120 prints by M.C. Escher hang in the former winter palace of Queen Emma on Lange Voorhout, from Day and Night to the seven-meter Metamorphosis III.
Kids get the most from the second floor, "Through Escher's Eyes": they turn giant or tiny in a few seconds, make their own tessellation, play with impossible figures and walk an Op-art room where the artworks seem to move.
