moved to the Coen Cuserhof. During the French occupation, the old men still living in the hofje were moved a block away to the present-day Proveniershuis, when the art collections of the two institutions were merged. The art of both locations, as well as the art of several other former Haarlem institutions, is now in the Frans Hals museum collection. The most notable artworks from the Oude Mannenhuis are the two group portraits of regents and regentesses by Frans Hals. The inventory of the Proveniershuis was drawn up by Pieter Langendijk and though some of the paintings have since been reattributed, his list is largely intact. The impressive regents' rooms have been rebuilt from other Haarlem locations. A room on the street side has a curious keystone above the door with masonic symbols denoting a mason's society and the text 'Metsselaars Proef-Kamer 1648 12/29'. History of the collection The older pieces of the museum collection, consisting of primarily religious themes, are Haarlem relics from the Reformation, when all Roman Catholic art was formally seized by the city council in 1648. Frans Hals himself worked as the first official city-paid restorer for some of these pieces. The city council then proceeded in the 17th century to rewrite Haarlem history, and purchased various large pieces to decorate the city hall, telling stories such as the legend of Damiate, or the legend of the Haarlem Shield. During this time the city hall functioned as a semi-public museum, though the term didn't even exist yet. The first signs of an official museum with a curator occurred when the Dutch Society of Science, founded in 1752, started to rent the Prinsenhof room of the city hall in 1754 for its meetings and began to furnish it as a Cabinet of curiosities. From an inventory list in the city archives it can be seen that they used as a model for their system of naming and presentation, the book Amboinsche Rariteitkamer by Georg Eberhard Rumphius. They shared the room with the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, that used it once every six years for its meetings. They hired a woman for the dusting and serving tea, and in 1768 they hired a man as curator, who was responsible for the entire collection and the medical Hortus garden in the yard. The spacious room soon proved too small for the number of donated artifacts it received