Haarlem Museums and Church

We are bringing you into several excellent museums, then show you a few other smaller museums, and visit the big church: Frans Hals Museum, Tylers Museum, Haarlem Museum, Archaeology Museum, Grote Kerk

Frans Hals Museum

We’ll start out with the Frans Hals Museum, one of the top attractions of Haarlem. The museum is located on Groot Heiligland in the old part of town in a building dating back to 1609 that was originally a retirement home for single old men.

The main attractions are the 16 paintings by Frans Hals, who lived most of his life in Haarlem, between 1616 and 1664, keeping very busy creating many individual portraits and large group ensembles. In the principal room it seems like you have entered a great banquet hall divided up in different tables. As you walk in it seems all the guests have turned around to look at you.

There are life-sized groups of officers and administrators of the hospital with faces turned to the spectator as if posing for a photograph, some standing, others seated, all splendidly dressed in colorful elaborate clothing.

Hals was the master of showing emotional expression in faces, often with suggestions of motion. You really feel as if you know these people, as if you’d met them before. This truth of expression and the jovial character, and the ample rich costumes of the 16th century make it seem like you’re really looking at the Holland of 300 years ago – as if you’re a watching historical play, not just an art gallery. The solo portraits are equally powerful as the groups. A multimedia exhibit immerses you in nearly all of his paintings.

In addition to Hals, works by many other Haarlem artists of the 17th century are on display along with several stately rooms saved from demolished houses, which have been partially reconstructed from other Haarlem locations with period furniture and decor.

The museum has a collection of over 750 works, most of them by artists from Haarlem, and especially from the first half of the 17th century. It is believed that over 100,000 paintings were created in Haarlem at that time, and more work from that period has survived in Haarlem than from any other Dutch city.

A painting by Peter Bruegel is accompanied by a fascinating multimedia interactive kiosk that shows you different parts of the painting in detail, with a touchscreen that illustrates 100 different proverb such as “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” and “that’s how the cards fall.” The viewer goes back and forth from the painting to the monitor in this engaging process to decode the symbolism.

The museum has an admirably varied collection including decorative arts, genre paintings, sculpture, and doll houses with miniature furniture – so it’s quite a great experience. The municipal art collection first got started back in the 1750s and was relocated to this building in 1913.

Haarlem Museum

Half a block away down the same street you’ll find the Haarlem Museum which is a display of the history of the city. It's a small museum, so it's easy to walk through it in one hour or less. There is a permanent collection focusing on the past 1,000 years of Haarlem, and how it attracted many migrants for centuries. They helped build the city and made it big with their beer, textiles and shipping.

Meet Haarlemmers from the past and present, from world famous to ordinary, and see the city through their eyes.
The museum also has ongoing special exhibits, and an excellent website that brings you through in a virtual tour, along with videos and written descriptions.

This museum is especially enticing if you have purchased the Museum Card that admits you to nearly every museum in the country, good for a month. With that card you wouldn't hesitate to go into a little museum like this history museum, which you might otherwise be reluctant to pay for.

That same Museum Card will get you into the Tylers Museum, where we are going next, located along the Spaarne River quite close to the central market square. Out front you’ll see a typical drawbridge, good for a scenic break while sitting a bench at the canal. The row of old buildings along the waterfront leads us to the entrance of the Tylers Museum with a Baroque façade in the Viennese style.

Tylers Museum

Tylers is a popular museum for families, with a diverse collection that goes well beyond just fine art. This is the oldest historical museum in the Netherlands and the interior retains that very old-fashioned feeling, like stepping back into 1778 when it was established.

Right away upon entering the first room you’ll notice display cases with that 19th-century style. The room is mostly fossils and bones of old creatures, including some remnants of early human and prehuman, and the first example ever found of the Archaeopteryx, a flying dinosaur.

Next we enter a room filled with the variety of scientific instruments including what had been the world’s largest electrostatic generator from the 18th century, old telescopes, microscopes, recording devices, telephones, whatnot. A small darkened room showcases luminescent minerals.

Then we get to the most famous gallery in the museum, the Oval Room, that dates back to its founding in the late 1700s with mineral displays in the center and scientific instruments from the 18th century all around it.

The room was designed for research and study with scientific experiments and public demonstrations conducted here. Archives and a library are in the upper level.

Next we enter couple of rooms packed with pretty paintings, and look at how they are stacked – multiple levels high in the old-fashioned way that really fills the wall space with beautiful things to look at. The paintings are works from the Dutch Romantic School and the later Hague and Amsterdam schools. They’re by major Dutch painters who you might not be familiar with, but that’s kind of liberating – you don’t have to look at the label to see who painted what – just enjoy the works in themselves.

The painting galleries were added in the 19th century to round out the collection and make it into a temple for the muses of the arts and sciences, based on revolutionary ideals derived from the Enlightenment, where people could discover and appreciate the complete world.

A new wing was added to the museum in 1996 to handle special exhibits. The new wing also houses a café looking out on the scenic garden courtyard.

Archaeology Museum

Now we are taking you a few blocks over to the center of town into the Archaeology Museum, located right on the market square. The museum is in the historic Meat Market located on the famous central market of town, the Grote Markt, which is also the location of the Great Church. It’s a small museum with just one room and display cases around it with artifacts from the history of Haarlem.

They even have a small reconstruction of an archaeological dig with a pit in the ground and shovels, trowels, buckets and a wheelbarrow.

There is a sandbox for kids to play in, like a little archaeology dig, where they can scoop dirt up into a bucket.

Grote Kerk

This impressive church has been the heart of the city and its most important landmark for centuries, built in the Gothic style of architecture, originally as a Catholic Church between 1370 and 1520 when it was finished.

In 1559 the church was officially named the Cathedral of the diocese of Haarlem Amsterdam, but 20 years later it was confiscated in the name of the Protestant Reformation and it has been a Protestant church ever since. Official name is De Grote of St. Bavokerk.

Its most famous feature is the huge organ that occupies nearly the entire west end of the building. The organ was the largest in the world when completed in 1738. It possesses four keyboards, 64 stops, and 5000 pipes, the largest of those being 32 feet high and 15 inches wide. It is still played today in regular concerts. Many famous musicians played this organ, including Mendelson, Handel and the 10-year-old Mozart, who was here in 1766.

The ceiling at the crossing is made of stone, but the rest of the roof is cedar wood, held up by 28 high stone columns, without any flying buttresses. The church is 460 feet long in a Latin cross layout with the tower 262 feet high. The lower part of the church is of brick and the upper walls, of stone. Even if the big organ is not being played during your visit, someone is often practicing on the smaller organ.

The interior of this church has changed little over the years, maintained in an accurate way faithful to the original design. Near the gift shop there is a model showing the overall design of the exterior.

More pages about Haarlem:

Haarlem main page

Haarlem Market

Haarlem Photo Galleries