The story
Museum De Lakenhal takes its name and its home from the cloth trade that once made Leiden rich. The building was the city's cloth hall of 1640, where officials inspected and stamped the fine wool the town was known for, and it became Leiden's civic museum in the 1870s.
Its treasure is older than the building. Lucas van Leyden's Last Judgment, a large three-panel altarpiece painted around 1526 for Leiden's main church, the Pieterskerk, was taken to safety by the city council when Protestant iconoclasts stripped the churches in 1566. It hung in the town hall for nearly three centuries before moving here in 1874. Around it hangs the painting of a city that produced Rembrandt and Jan Steen, both born here, including early Rembrandt.
The old inspection room survives too, its walls still hung with Isaac van Swanenburg's paintings of the cloth-making trades in their original places.
