The first objects in the Teylers Museum collection were collected by Pieter Teyler around 1750. Of these, coins, medals and medallions in particular have been preserved. Following Teyler’s death, the directors of the Teylers Foundation actively continued to collect. They focused especially on Western European drawings and paintings, instruments, fossils and minerals, and books. This is how the sub-collections of Art, Science and the Library came into being.
Sub-collections
Teylers Museum has divided the collection into Art and Science. Each sub-collection contains objects museum staff call ‘highlights’. For example, because an object is unique in the world, because it represents a development in the history of science, or was made by a famous artist. Admire our Highlights at the museum or study them in detail in the collection database.
Some of our highlights are kept in storage. Drawings in particular are very fragile. If they are kept in brightly lit surroundings for too long, the paper discolours and the image fades. In the First Picture Gallery, large boxes with modern copies of the drawings are available to visitors. Anyone can take them out and view them.
GBIF
Global Biodiversity Information Facility is an international network and data infrastructure, funded by governments worldwide. It provides free and open access to data on all forms of life on Earth, regardless of time or place. GBIF enables institutions worldwide to share data on where and when species have been observed, using common standards, best practices and open-source tools. This information is collected from a wide range of sources: from museum specimens collected as early as the 18th and 19th centuries to DNA barcodes and smartphone photos taken in recent days. Teylers Museum has been affiliated with GBIF since 2023. More than 5,000 fossils, including important type specimens (the unique specimens on which the scientific name of a species is based), have been unlocked and made available online for scientific research. This dataset is a valuable source for studies in the field of biodiversity and paleontology.Teylers Museum remains committed to making even more fossils accessible via GBIF in the future.
