Teylers Museum

Teylers Museum in Haarlem is the oldest museum in the Netherlands and a rare surviving museum of the Enlightenment: a place where each room was fitted out in the spirit of its own time and then, remarkably, left almost untouched. It grew from the will of Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, a wealthy Mennonite cloth merchant and banker who died in 1778 and left his fortune to promote religion, art and science. His executors decided to create a centre of study and display under one roof, modelled on the ancient idea of a "mouseion", a temple of the muses open to scholars.

Its heart is the Oval Room, designed by Leendert Viervant behind Teyler's house and opened in 1784. It is a neoclassical, top-lit room with a gallery running around it, built for experiments, lectures and the viewing of books and prints. The central case still holds an 18th-century mineral collection; the cases around it are filled with scientific instruments of the period; and the upper gallery is lined with bookcases of period encyclopaedias and journals. The museum's first director, Martinus van Marum, used it for research into electricity, and his enormous electrostatic generator, built by John Cuthbertson in 1784 and then the largest in the world, is still here.

The museum kept growing through the 19th century, and each addition was kept as it was made: two painting galleries of 1838 and 1892, and a monumental entrance and instrument room, fossil rooms and library opened in 1885 behind a new front on the river Spaarne, designed by the Viennese architect Christian Ulrich. The fossil halls hold, among much else, Mosasaurus material bought by van Marum, and the paintings include the Dutch Romantics and the Hague School — Koekkoek, Mesdag, Mauve, Breitner and others. In 1790 the young museum bought a large group of Italian drawings in Rome, including 22 by Michelangelo; the drawings collection now runs to more than 10,000 sheets, Rembrandt among them. Science never left: the Nobel laureate Hendrik Lorentz was curator of its physics cabinet from 1910 until his death in 1928.

The complete archive — every account, visitors' book and board minute since 1778 — survives too, which makes the museum a document of its own history.

Getting there

The museum stands on the river Spaarne in the centre of Haarlem. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) is about 12 km away.