Frans Hals Museum. The Frans Hals Museum is a museum located in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The museum was established in 1862. In 1950, the museum was split in two locations when the collection of modern art was moved to the Museum De Hallen. The main collection, including its famous 17th-century Frans Hals paintings, for which the museum is named, is located in the former Oude Mannenhuis on the Groot Heiligland. The museum was founded in 1862 in the newly renovated former Dominican church cloisters located in the back of the Haarlem city hall known as the Prinsenhof, and when it needed more space, it moved to the recently vacated location of the town orphanage in 1913. The collection is based on the large number of paintings owned by the City of Haarlem, which includes over 100 artworks seized from Catholic churches in the 1580s after the Protestant Reformation, and Haarlem art rescued from demolished local buildings from the 15th century onwards. In 2018 the museum re-merged with Museum De Hallen to form a single museum called the Frans Hals Museum with two locations: Hof and Hal. The Haarlem Oude Mannenhuis was a hofje founded in 1609. The residential rooms were situated around a courtyard in the style of contemporary Haarlem Hofjes. Each of the thirty little houses was inhabited by two men; to be eligible to living there they had to be at least 60 years old, honest Haarlem residents, and single. They were required to bring their own household goods listed as a bed, a chair with a cushion, a tin chamberpot, three blankets, six good shirts and six nightcaps. They were locked in each night at eight o'clock in the summer and at seven in the winter. The residents had to make a weekly collection with a poor-box, and a statue of a man holding this can be seen in the entrance hall of the museum. The old men's home was governed by five regents, whose portraits, painted by Frans Hals in 1664, are on display. Though the men's home dates from 1609, only the main hall is still mostly intact. During the intervening centuries the complex was renovated beyond recognition, most notably by the previous inhabitants, the Haarlem municipal orphanage which made use of the complex from 1810 until 1908, when it moved to the Coen Cuserhof. During the French occupation, the old men still living in the hofje were moved a block away to the present-day Proveniershuis, when the art collections of the two institutions were merged. The art of both locations, as well as the art of several other former Haarlem institutions, is now in the Frans Hals museum collection. The most notable artworks from the Oude Mannenhuis are the two group portraits of regents and regentesses by Frans Hals. The inventory of the Proveniershuis was drawn up by Pieter Langendijk and though some of the paintings have since been reattributed, his list is largely intact. The impressive regents' rooms have been rebuilt from other Haarlem locations. A room on the street side has a curious keystone above the door with masonic symbols denoting a mason's society and the text 'Metsselaars Proef-Kamer 1648 12/29'. The older pieces of the museum collection, consisting of primarily religious themes, are Haarlem relics from the Reformation, when all Roman Catholic art was formally seized by the city council in 1648. Frans Hals himself worked as the first official city-paid restorer for some of these pieces. The city council then proceeded in the 17th century to rewrite Haarlem history, and purchased various large pieces to decorate the city hall, telling stories such as the legend of Damiate, or the legend of the Haarlem Shield. During this time the city hall functioned as a semi-public museum, though the term didn't even exist yet. The first signs of an official museum with a curator occurred when the Dutch Society of Science, founded in 1752, started to rent the Prinsenhof room of the city hall in 1754 for its meetings and began to furnish it as a Cabinet of curiosities. From an inventory list in the city archives it can be seen that they used as a model for their system of naming and presentation, the book Amboinsche Rariteitkamer by Georg Eberhard Rumphius. They shared the room with the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, that used it once every six years for its meetings. They hired a woman for the dusting and serving tea, and in 1768 they hired a man as curator, who was responsible for the entire collection and the medical Hortus garden in the yard. The spacious room soon proved too small for the number of donated artifacts it received from its members, thanks to the increase in shipping and associated travel. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Haarlem became a bedroom community of Amsterdam, with many wealthy bankers becoming members of the young Society.