☰Teylers Museum

The oldest museum in the Netherlands, opened in 1784 as a scientific cabinet under the will of the wealthy silk-merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst. The original neoclassical Oval Room is itself a museum piece — glass cases of fossils, minerals, and 18th-century instruments, lit through a central skylight. Teylers also holds a superb collection of Old Master drawings (Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Raphael, Claude Lorrain), rotated through the galleries. A small, slow, and deeply satisfying museum.