The story
In 1650 Frans Hals, the Haarlem portrait painter, painted Nicolaas Stenius, a Catholic priest in a Dutch Republic where Catholics could worship only out of public view. Stenius served the village of Akersloot, where in 1633 he had built a barn church, a place of worship that looked from outside like a farm building. More than two centuries later a Haarlem priest and collector, Monsignor Jacobus Graaf, was gathering objects for a new bishop's museum and found the portrait crumpled in the attic of the old Akersloot rectory.
That kind of rescue lies behind much of this museum. Most of its paintings came from three older church collections, the archbishop's museum in Utrecht, the bishop's museum in Haarlem and the Old Catholic museum in Utrecht, and in 1979 they were brought together in the former convent of Saint Catherine. The Knights of Saint John, a hospital order, held the convent from 1529, and its church is now Utrecht's Catholic cathedral. The displays follow the religious history of the Netherlands, Catholic and Protestant alike, from a 9th-century chalice linked to the missionary Saint Lebuinus to modern work.
Among the paintings, look for the small Man of Sorrows by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, a painter who lived with the Knights of Saint John in Haarlem, made around 1490 and showing Christ wounded and bare to the waist. There is also an early Rembrandt, The Baptism of the Eunuch, dated 1626, when he was about 20 and still working in Leiden. The museum has owned it since 1976.
