Escher in The Palace Museum Tickets The Hague

The palace on Lange Voorhout

Escher in The Palace occupies the Lange Voorhout Palace, an elegant eighteenth-century mansion on the most stately avenue of The Hague. Built in the 1760s for a wealthy family, it was bought by the Dutch royal family at the end of the nineteenth century and served as the winter residence of a queen mother, who received guests in its salons. Later it became a working palace, used for offices and receptions, until the late twentieth century.

Since 2002 the building has housed a museum dedicated to the Dutch graphic artist whose name it carries. On the ground floor the royal rooms still show their period fireplaces, tall windows and fine plasterwork, and displays tell the story of the palace and its royal residents. Is Escher in The Palace worth visiting? For lovers of art, mathematics or puzzles, it is one of the most original museums in the Netherlands.

The mind-bending print collection

The first floor holds the heart of the collection: woodcuts, lithographs and drawings that play with perspective, symmetry and infinity. Look for staircases that climb forever yet return to where they started, a waterfall that seems to flow uphill, two hands drawing each other off the page and flat patterns of birds, fish and lizards that tessellate perfectly across the paper.

The star piece is a woodcut almost seven metres long, in which squares, letters and creatures gradually change into a coastal village, a chessboard and back again. The audio guide explains how each image was made, from early landscapes of southern Italy to the precise mathematical works of later years. Allow at least forty-five minutes here to study the details.

Optical-illusion rooms and palace chandeliers

The top floor turns the ideas of the prints into interactive experiences. In one room, visitors seem to grow or shrink as they walk from one corner to another; other displays use mirrors, screens and clever angles to show how the eye can be fooled. It is the part of the museum that families and teenagers enjoy most, and it makes great photographs.

Throughout the palace, look up at the playful contemporary chandeliers designed especially for the museum, in surprising shapes such as a shark and a skull, which add a touch of humour to the royal rooms. Together with the restored interiors, they make the building itself part of the experience, linking its royal past with the illusions on display.

Visiting the museum and the Lange Voorhout

The museum stands at Lange Voorhout 74, a short stroll from the Mauritshuis and the Binnenhof. If you are wondering how to get to Escher in The Palace, it is about ten minutes on foot from Den Haag Centraal station, and several tram lines stop nearby. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday and is closed on Mondays, and your ticket stays valid for 365 days.

The Lange Voorhout itself is worth a slow walk: a wide L-shaped avenue lined with lime trees, embassies and grand eighteenth-century mansions, and in spring and summer it often hosts open-air sculpture shows and book markets. The best time to visit the museum is a weekday morning, when the illusion rooms are quieter and you can try every experiment in peace.