The Hague, Holland: discovering a Dutch master Amsterdam city break guide There's time, even on a day trip, to lunch in good-value bistros and browse the quirky fashion shops or designer antique emporiums of the old Hofkwartier. Or, if you come for the weekend, to hire a bike and cycle along a network of dedicated cycle lanes to the genteel seaside suburb of Scheveningen (scheveningendenhaag.com) - a sort of small-scale Dutch Brighton - for Sunday brunch in a revamped beach pavilion. People are so vague about The Hague that it comes as a surprise to many visitors to discover that one of the most famous Dutch paintings of them all is here: Vermeer's Girl With the Pearl Earring. It's one of a clutch of Dutch Golden Age masterpieces housed in the Mauritshuis (mauritshuis.nl), a 17th-century nobleman's town house that brushes up against the Binnenhof Royal Palace and overlooks the Hofvijver, a swan-plied lake seemingly designed for maximum scenic effect. With its dozens of Rembrandts and Vermeers, Steens and Holbeins, the Mauritshuis is one of the world's great small museums, and for sheer artistic satisfaction per square foot is the equal of anything in Amsterdam. Vermeer's Girl is as good a place to start as any. She hangs without much special fuss in one of the museum's house-sized rooms. It's one of those paintings you first glance at as if at an old friend - then, looking more closely, are surprised by. The Mauritshuis, one of the world's great small museums, which closes for refurbishment in April No reproduction quite catches the dreamlike quality of the light, or the way the artist manages to focus all our attention on a face that is itself not quite in focus. But the same painter's View of Delft, on the opposite wall, is just as absorbing: a study in the quietude of early morning that has the depth, atmosphere and movement of a long placing shot in a film. Now is the time to come if you want to see the whole collection in situ. On April 24, the Mauritshuis will close for at least two years to allow the museum (which suffers from seriously cramped visitor facilities and exhibition spaces) to expand via an underground foyer to a vacant Art Deco building across the road. During renovation, 70 works from the collection - including the View of Delft - will move into temporary quarters at the Gemeentemuseum, while Girl With a Pearl Earring will go out on loan on a fund-raising "world tour" that will take her to museums in Japan and the United States. The Mauritshuis's imminent closure is a good excuse to visit The Hague now; but sightseeing in The Hague is not all high culture. In fact, two of its other main visitor magnets, Panorama Mesdag and the Madurodam, together chart the modern history of the visitor attraction. Panorama Mesdag (panorama-mesdag.com) is a huge cylindrical landscape painting from 1881 of the beach and fledgling resort at Scheveningen displayed in a tower shaped like a camera obscura - and indeed the illusion that attracted thousands of visitors back in those pre-cinema times was that one was really looking out from a tower with a 360-degree view. It's still a potent illusion today, one curiously not dispelled by the often impressionistic technique of the artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag. You can almost taste the salt on the air. Inaugurated more than 70 years later, in 1952, as a memorial to the resistance hero George Maduro, who died in Dachau, Madurodam (madurodam.nl) is a 1:25 scale "Holland in Miniature" park visited by around 600,000 people a year. It is startling in its detail: on its Schiphol airport baggage system, 500 tiny suitcases do an eternal carousel dance. When the Madurodam reopens in April after a 60th anniversary facelift, the whole experience will become more hands-on. In some cases literally so: like little Hansje Brinker, you'll be able to plug the holes in a miniature dyke and save Holland from flooding. Now that's progress for you. The Hague basics The Hague is a 30-minute transfer by rail from Schiphol airport (easyjet.com, ba.com, KLM.com, cityjet.com) or you can travel from London by Eurostar via Brussels (raileurope.co.uk). The Hotel Des Indes (hoteldesindesthehague.com; doubles from €136/£115) is the Ritz of The Hague, a Belle Époque gem revamped by the French interior designer Jacques Garcia in 2006 in a playfully sumptuous style. The Hotel Mozaic (mozaic.nl; doubles from €70/£59) is an affordable design hotel that feels warm despite the prevailing white, black and grey-brown décor. Where to eat The old town is full of cafés, bistros and ethnic restaurants, especially around Molenstraat, just south of the Royal Palace, and Denneweg, which runs north from the Hotel Des Indes. The organic café Juni Lekkernijen (Molenstraat 63, junilekkernijen.nl, closed Monday) makes for a good, cheap and healthy lunch stop, for salads, filled ciabattas or bagels and homemade desserts. At the classy bistro Maxime (Denneweg 10b, restaurantmaxime.nl), two excellent French-inflected four-course prix fixe menus are offered for €35 (£30), wine excluded. Little V (Rabbijn Maarsenplein 21, littlev.nl, closed Monday) is a stylish Vietnamese restaurant where you can eat well, drinks included, for around €25 to €30 (£21 to £25) per head. Solid Dutch bikes (with or without gears) can be rented from Totzo! (Nordeinde 59, totzo.org), which also organises themed and general bike tours - ask for one led by Danny Versmoren, who is an endless fount of local knowledge and anecdotes. More information denhaag.com