Qualla: Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn

Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fryslan0109 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. In 1598, a Catholic curate named Pieter Jansz Codde wrote his will and left instructions that, from the proceeds, four small rooms, camerkens, should be founded for poor elderly women in Haarlem. The Reformation had just stripped the Catholics of their churches and their public worship. Codde, who served the old Sint-Bavokerk before it was taken over by the Protestants, could not openly fund a Catholic charity. The hofje he left behind has now been quietly housing devout Catholic women in Haarlem for more than four centuries, surviving the loss of two buildings, an enforced merger with a painter's bequest, and a Frans Hals scandal that nearly destroyed its reputation. It is, today, the wealthiest hofje in a city famous for them.

Image: Fryslan0109 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn: The Hofje in the Hidden Quarter

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jane023, CC BY-SA 3.0. A hofje is a particular kind of Dutch institution: private charitable housing, usually arranged around a quiet courtyard, founded by a wealthy individual for the elderly poor. Haarlem has more of them than any other Dutch city. Codde's executor, Hendrick Spoorwater, built the fir...

Image: Jane023 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn: A Painter's Sister and a Painter's Lie

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Circle of Frans Hals, Public domain. Nearly a century after Codde, in 1684, the landscape painter Claes van Beresteyn founded a second hofje on the Lange Herenstraat. The Beresteyns were a wealthy Haarlem family with deep ties to the city's painters. The painter Pieter Soutman was a friend and served as regent. The ...

Image: Circle of Frans Hals | Public domain

Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn: Moving in the Shadow of Saint Bavo

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jane023 (talk) 08:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC), CC BY-SA 2.5. In 1968 the hofje moved for the second time in its history, to a modern building on the J. Cuyperstraat next to the Cathedral of Saint Bavo on the Leidsevaart canal. The street is named for Joseph Cuypers, the architect who designed that nineteenth-century Catholic cathedral afte...

Image: Jane023 (talk) 08:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Hofje Codde en Van Beresteijn: What the Money Does

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jane023, CC BY-SA 3.0. Catholic women in Haarlem aged sixty and over are still welcome to live there for free. The wealth from the Rothschild and Louvre sales, scandalous when it happened, has now been compounding for nearly a century and a half, and the foundation uses some of its income to support ot...

Image: Jane023 | CC BY-SA 3.0