Step inside Europe's Oldest Museum and explore its Extraordinary Treasures

PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

When Pieter Teyler van der Hulst passed away in 1778, he bequeathed his entire estate to a foundation dedicated to art, science, and public education. The museum that followed has never strayed from that charge. Emma Becque explores its rooms, archives and cabinets.

BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 6 DECEMBER 2025

Teylers Museum is considered a rare and large-scale example of cabinets of curiosities © Isabel Bronts  

As perfectly preserved as a pressed flower in an 18th-century herbarium, Teylers Museum in Haarlem has long been a singular architectural and cultural landmark. Founded at the dawn of the Enlightenment and still operating from the house where it began, the institution grew from an unusual bequest by Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, a wealthy Mennonite merchant who believed knowledge should improve public life. The building and its contents reflect the period’s fervour for scientific demonstration and the study of art, minerals, fossils and books, arranged not for spectacle but for practical enquiry. 

Teyler was prosperous but private, never marrying and leaving no heirs, making few appearances in the public record. In 1778, he left his fortune and his house on Damstraat to a foundation with a meticulous plan: to support learned societies, charity and the advancement of art and science for the benefit of all citizens. “He named the first five directors himself,” says Chief Curator Trienke van der Spek, who leads the scientific collections today. “They were instructed to meet at his house. The foundation was to be administered from here, not elsewhere.”

“The directive was literal”, van der Spek explains. In a small chamber off the inner hall, a sturdy wooden strongroom door remains, fitted with five locks. Each director held a key. “The funds could only be accessed when all five were present. This prevented any one person from acting alone.” The lock plate remains in place, solid and ordinary, an easy to miss original piece, which is precisely the point.

Public museums were rare at the end of the 18th century, and collections often remained in private hands, accessible only through letters of introduction or personal acquaintance. Yet Haarlem, a city of publishing houses and scientific clubs, had a receptive audience for a more open institution. By 1779, the directors concluded that a dedicated room for study and demonstration was needed. They commissioned the Amsterdam architect Leendert Viervant, who was steeped in the measured classicism then considered appropriate.

The result was the Oval Room, which was completed in 1784. Visitors originally entered through Teyler’s own front door, proceeding down a narrow marble-enveloped corridor to a space that was neither grand nor modest, but simply functional. The floor is made of pine, the walls are lined with oak panelling, and ten built-in cascading vitrines hold minerals, instruments, printed volumes, and other tools of fascination.

The room’s central cabinet of curiosity, a large rectangular structure with a flat top, was originally used to examine drawings and minerals © Isabel Bronts  

Above, a slim staircase rises to a gallery with an iron balustrade and fold-out lecterns for consulting books shielded from light by green curtains behind copper mesh. Nothing in the room is decorative for its own sake, instead, it remains a space designed for use. “It was never meant to be a showpiece,” van der Spek says. “The Oval Room was a working environment. Books were read here, instruments handled, experiments performed.” 

When Martinus van Marum, a natural philosopher known for his work on electricity, became the museum’s first scientific director, he commissioned a vast electrostatic generator from London-born instrument maker John Cuthbertson. “The cabinet was accordingly modified so one section could slide aside to accommodate the device. Demonstrations drew scholars, students and prying locals”, explains van der Spek.

“The vitrines still contain the results of two centuries of collecting”, van der Spek delights. Like jewels, there are elongated metallic stibnite clusters from Japan, Kongsberg silver formed in twisting filaments, and two fluorite pyramids placed to demonstrate colour and structure. A full suite of pear wood crystal models sits beside them, used to teach mineral geometry before printed diagrams became widespread. A fragment cut from the summit of Mont Blanc rests plainly on a shelf, beside original handwritten labels. 

Above, a small observatory crowns the roof. “It was used for daylight observations,” van der Spek says. “Not precise by modern standards, but it provided meteorological and solar readings, which were useful.” In 1826, a two-storey extension was added, providing a Reading Room and spaces for public lectures.

One of the gallery rooms showcases the museum’s significant group of Michelangelo and Raphael drawings, acquired in 1799 © Isabel Bronts

Teyler’s belief that knowledge should be widely accessible meant that scientific books, often prohibitively expensive, could be consulted here without charge. The furniture remains much as it was, lending the sense of a library whose users have momentarily stepped away. By 1838, the museum had begun acquiring contemporary Dutch art, and the First Picture Gallery opened. Paintings were hung in ordered rows, reflecting taste and display conventions of the time.

The institution expanded again in 1880, when an architectural competition produced the design for the New Museum wing facing the canal. The final version, based on a facade drawing by the Viennese architect Christian Ulrich, opened in 1885 with a central rotunda, lecture halls, and galleries for physics and palaeontology. The stair hall is fitted with bronze antidotal torchieres representing electricity. “They were originally fitted with gas, not electric bulbs,” van der Spek notes. “Electric lighting was not yet stable.”

The Fossil Room, completed in 1885, is one of the museum’s most fascinating spaces. Floor-to-ceiling timber cabinets are filled with specimens collected during the formative years of palaeontology, when the concept of extinction was still new and the age of the earth was debated. There is a Mosasaurus skull, a Palaeozoic fish, Tertiary mammal fragments, and the specimen once known as the “deluge man”, which has been used in theological arguments, where some believed it to be the remains of Noah’s Ark fatalities.

“Mary Anning’s discoveries in Lyme Regis helped shift thinking about extinction and geological time,” van der Spek says. “You can see that shift in the way specimens are labelled and grouped. The room shows the development of science in real time, it’s quite extraordinary .”

The atelier inside Pieter Teyler van der Hulsts private home remains untouched © Isabel Bronts  

To understand Pieter Teyler fully, his home was transformed into a museum, while remaining physically connected to it. The rooms are smaller in scale, featuring plastered ceilings, hand-finished joinery, and glass panes with slight irregularities that reflect the period in which they were created.

The Board Rooms remain intact. “The foundation still meets here occasionally,” van der Spek says. “It was always intended to be a working institution, not a memorial.” Equally compelling is the atelier, where curators would sit and ponder over acquisitions. Here, wallpapers inspired by floral and fauna remain intact.

The museum has not been refitted into a stage or set: floors show marks of use, cabinets show smudges and fingerprints. The building was expanded by addition rather than replacement, and the layers remain visible. It is, in effect, a museum of a museum, reflecting not only the history of science and art, but the history of how institutions learn and grow.

“I hope visitors see that this building has served the same purpose for almost 250 years,” van der Spek says. “To encourage learning. To support curiosity. That is what Pieter Teyler intended, and I am sure he would be proud to see it today.”

The marble paved kitchen inside the recently opened house museum © Isabel Bronts