Frans Hals Museum

About

The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem holds the largest collection of Frans Hals paintings in the world. Founded in 1862 as the city's municipal museum, it moved in 1913 to its present home on Groot Heiligland: a former old men's almshouse built in 1607-1611. Hals's Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse is part of the collection, so painting and place overlap in a rare way. At the heart of the museum are Hals's civic guard group portraits, shown alongside works by Haarlem's Golden Age masters such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen, Judith Leyster and Pieter Saenredam, as well as modern and contemporary art from 1880 onward. It is the place to meet the great seventeenth-century portraitist in the city where he lived and worked.