Frans Hals Museum

The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands, houses the world’s largest collection of paintings by 17th-century artist Frans Hals, alongside works by other notable artists from the Dutch Golden Age and modern periods.

Planning your visit

The Frans Hals Museum holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, and Hals rewards seeing in quantity. His portraits are looser and faster than his contemporaries' — visible brushwork, sitters caught mid-expression rather than composed — and the effect is startlingly modern when a room of them is seen together. The great civic guard group portraits are the centrepiece: enormous canvases of Haarlem militia companies at their banquets, painted across decades, in which Hals solved the problem of making a dozen paying sitters each look important without the picture falling apart.

The museum occupies a seventeenth-century almshouse, which is where Hals himself is thought to have spent his last impoverished years — he died in poverty in 1666 after outliving his fashionability. The building's courtyard and small rooms suit the work.

Haarlem is fifteen minutes by train from Amsterdam, and the town is an easy, much quieter alternative for a day out, with the Grote Kerk and its Muller organ that Mozart played.

The museum operates across two sites, with modern and contemporary art at the second location. The main booking is an entrance ticket with audio guide. Current availability is listed below.