Museum De Lakenhal is the city museum of fine art and history in Leiden, Netherlands. Founded in 1874, its collection ranges from early works by Rembrandt van Rijn and Lucas van Leyden’s Last Judgement to modern classics of De Stijl and artworks created by contemporary artists such as Claudy Jongstra, Atelier van Lieshout. One notable collection is that of fijnschilder paintings from the Dutch Golden Age.
The museum building was erected in 1640 by Arent van ‘Gravesande as a cloth hall (lakenhal in Dutch) – a guild hall for cloth merchants. The museum was founded in 1874 as a stedelijk museum (municipal museum). Since 1874, the space taken up by the museum has gradually grown. An exhibition hall was added at the end of the nineteenth century and a new wing in 1922. A complete (and prize-winning) renovation took place between 2016 and 2019.
On permanent display is also the old inspection room or Staalmeesterskamer, where cloth was inspected, and the meeting hall where disputes were decided. Four large paintings depicting the cloth industry by Isaac van Swanenburg hang in the same spots on the walls as designed. Similarly, a grand over-the-mantel piece by Carel de Moor shows the inspectors in a massive wooden frame decorated with their family shields, flanked by a series of three historical allegories of the city of Leiden by Abraham Lambertsz van den Tempel.
Here is a photographic impression of architecture and collection of Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden.