Undisputed giants of Western art dominate our tours of the Netherlands – Van Gogh of course, and painters of the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century. On separate itineraries we visit the world’s two finest collections of Van Gogh’s work, in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in tiny Otterlo; linger not once but twice in the magnificent Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (where works by Rembrandt and Vermeer abound); find time for the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, also in Amsterdam; and explore smaller museums such as the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the superb Mauritshuis in The Hague.
The Netherlands also feature in ‘Charlemagne to Charles V’, a tour dedicated to the art and architecture of the Low countries in the Middle Ages, when the town of Maastricht was known not for its close association with the EU but as an important religious centre with a vast Romanesque church and tenth-century crypt.