Teylers Museum
The oldest museum in the Netherlands, an 18th-century cabinet of art, fossils and instruments.
Teylers Museum grew out of the will of the Haarlem silk merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, who died in 1778 and left his fortune for the study of art and science. The Oval Room, built between 1779 and 1784 by Leendert Viervant the Younger, opened as a public cabinet and has never been emptied, which makes this the oldest museum in the Netherlands. Displays are still lit by daylight, labelled by hand and shown in their original cases.
The holdings mix disciplines in a way that has largely disappeared elsewhere: fossils and minerals, including a Mosasaurus skull and early Solnhofen specimens, eighteenth-century electrostatic and optical instruments such as Martinus van Marum's giant electrostatic generator of 1784, coins and medals, and a drawings cabinet with sheets by Michelangelo, Raphael and Rembrandt. Later wings of 1885 and 1996 added the Spaarne entrance front, painting galleries and temporary exhibition space, and the complex holds the Teylers Foundation library and observatory.
Highlights
- The 1784 Oval Room, the oldest museum interior in the country
- Van Marum's giant electrostatic generator of 1784
- Drawings by Michelangelo, Raphael and Rembrandt, shown in rotation
- Fossil and mineral cabinets including a Mosasaurus skull
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