Haarlem - Teyler's Museum

At the end of the Bakenesser Gracht, to the right, is Teyler's Museum, the oldest museum in the Netherlands, founded in 1778. Pieter Teyler van der Hulst (1702-78) was a wealthy cloth and silk dealer interested in the arts and sciences who bequeathed his whole fortune for the building of this museum, which is designed to illustrate the development of art and science. The museum, only the fourth of its kind in Europe (after Oxford, London and Paris), assembled within a relatively brief space of time not only an extensive art collection, with numerous drawings and pictures by early Dutch masters as well as by Michelangelo and Raphael, but also an outstanding collection of scientific instruments, minerals and fossils.