The Best Novels Set in Netherlands for Arts-loving Travelers

Reading novels set in the Netherlands is a wonderful way to set the mood for travel and to enrich your experience once you arrive.

From the canals of Amsterdam to the studios of Golden Age painters, Dutch history and culture have inspired a remarkable range of fiction.

Each novel featured here connects in some way to the arts, including painting, mapmaking, textiles, and the iconic imagery of tulips and merchant cities.

The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal

The Anatomy Lesson takes readers through a single day in Golden Age Amsterdam when the city is preparing for the Winter Festival: executions, followed by a public dissection, and then a feast and torch parade through the city.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

History and fiction merge seamlessly in a novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening set in 1664 Delft. Young Griet goes to work in the household of the great painter Johannes Vermeer and is immortalized in canvas and paint.

The Rembrandt Secret by Alex Connor

Inspired by real events in the artist’s life, The Rembrandt Secret is a historical thriller that follows a deadly serial killer who is wreaking havoc across London and New York.

The Vermeer Deception by Jennifer S. Alderson

Book 4 in Jennifer S. Alderson’s Zelda Richardson Mystery series revolves around the discovery of a missing portrait by Johannes Vermeer that results in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with unethical art collectors, unscrupulous dealers, and an all-too-real killer.

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam is a city in the grip of tulip fever. To celebrate growing wealthy from this exotic new flower, a merchant commissions a gifted young artist to paint him with his beautiful bride. But as the portrait grows, so does the passion between his wife and the painter; and ambitions, desires, and dreams breed an intricate deception and a reckless gamble.

The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals by Michael Kernan

When ancient notebooks surface in a Long Island garage, Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia grad student, sets about translating them, and finds himself immersed in the life and times of the Dutch painter Frans Hals. The notebooks appear to be Hals’s diaries, and they paint a gripping portrait of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes, and bursting with a lust for the world surrounding him.

The Winter Dress by Lauren Chater

Textiles historian Jo Baker returns to the Dutch island of her birth to investigate the provenance of a valuable 17th-century silk dress retrieved from a shipwreck. Her research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress who served on the fringes of the Dutch court. But how did Anna come to possess such a precious dress?

The Map Colorist by Rebecca D’Harlingue

In 1660, Amsterdam is the trading and map-printing capital of the world. Anneke van Brug is one of the colorists paid to enhance black-and-white maps for a growing number of collectors. But Anneke is not content to simply embellish the work of others; she longs to create maps of her own.  

Still Life by Dodie Bishop

In this 17th-century historical romance, gifted artist Clara Peeters has to make sacrifices and risk everything to pursue her craft. Together with fellow pupil Nico, the two find themselves surrounded by dangerous secrets and powerful enemies. But in the face of so much past pain, can something as fragile as love survive?