Fries Museum

The Fries Museum is a museum in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. It has won the Global Fine Art Award which is sometimes nicknamed the Museum-Oscar.The museum was founded on 13 April 1881 by the "Provincial Friesch Genootschap ter Beoefening van Friesche Geschied-, Oudheid- en Taalkunde", a society for the preservation of Frisian culture that itself was founded in 1827 and needed a place to exhibit the various artifacts it had gathered together. In the early decades this local museum on the Turfmarkt, Leeuwarden, an offshoot of the Antiquarisch Kabinet van Friesland, was focussed on typical Hindelooper goods and other Frisian curiosities that had been collected by the local preacher-writer Joost Hiddes Halbertsma. The first historical exhibition of 1877, however, which had over 1500 items on loan and attracted many visitors, led to an unexpected profit of 17,000 guilders, and the museum was able to purchase a new property on the Koningstraat, the former "Eysinga house", where the museum opened its doors in 1881.

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