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

The turn toward secular subjects of Dutch culture in the Golden Age was a lucky result of Calvinism, which banished most art from churches while tolerating it in daily life, on the condition that it illustrate proper morality.

NEWYORKER: New Amsterdam