If things had turned out differently for Brazil — I don’t mean in the World Cup — Recife might now be known as Mauritsstad. But when the Portuguese expelled the Dutch in 1654, the name of the new capital of Pernambuco built by governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen was lost to history.
Today Johan Maurits is remembered for a house, not a city: the splendid private mansion he had built for himself in The Hague right next to the Dutch parliament in the Binnenhof. Designed by the architect Jacob van Campen, the Mauritshuis is a Dutch Classicist doll’s house of a palace that took 11 years to build and was only lived in by its owner for three after his return from Brazil in 1644. On his death in 1679, Johan Maurits’s ‘beautiful, very beautiful and supremely beautiful house’ — no single superlative did it justice — passed to his principal creditors.
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