Panorama Mesdag

On the Zeestraat stands a round building holding the beach of Scheveningen as it looked in 1881. A hundred and twenty metres around, fourteen metres high, painted in a few months by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten and a handful of colleagues. George Hendrik Breitner, young and unknown at the time, was given the cavalry in the dunes.

Mesdag made his sketches from the Seinpostduin, a high dune above the village. That dune was later dug away for the boulevard, so the view survives only in here.

The Belgian company behind the panorama went bankrupt within five years. Panoramas had gone out of fashion and the crowds stayed away. Mesdag then bought the canvas himself and kept it running for the rest of his life, losing money on it year after year.

Between you and the canvas lies real sand, with beach poles and an old boat set into it. Your eye never quite finds the line where the painting begins.

Feel like walking on? Our routes through The Hague pass places with stories much like this one.