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STAM is a museum located in the historical Belgian city of Ghent. The museum, which opened its doors at the end of 2010, shows the history of Ghent.

Although the museum is new, the collection and the museum origins go back to the early 19th century. In 1833, the Commission for Monuments and Cityscapes of Ghent founded the archaeological museum ‘Musée historique belge’. The museum was founded during a moment of great interest in local and national history.

Initially, the collection objects were donated by the members of the Commission. The collection gradually grew with modest contributions from benefactors over time.  

With many important additions, the collection grew into a varied and interesting group of objects that together tell the story of Ghent. For example, in 1848, the Ghent city council donated several important objects from the city’s heritage to the museum. By 1884, the museum had become an urban institution and appointed its first curator. 

The collection has been housed in a number of buildings over the years. From a Jesuit monastery, the town hall (1838), the church of the Baudelo abbey (1874), the church of the Calced Carmelites (1884), and finally in the buildings of the Bijloke Abbey (1928), which led to the name change ‘Bijloke Museum’. The Bijloke Museum closed on September 11, 2005 and the STAM city museum opened on October 9, 2010, with the Bijloke collection as its foundation.

Although the museum focuses on the history and arts and crafts of the city of Ghent, it also houses a couple of Delftware objects, of which a blue and white plaque is the most important. The plaque, depicting a wild boar hunt, is painted by Frederik van Frijtom in the second half of the seventeenth-century.

 

The Moritzburg Art Museum is located in the German city of Halle an der Saale. It was founded in 1885 as the city’s museum of arts and crafts. It was not until 1904 that the museum was moved to its current location: the historical structure in the revitalized ruins of Moritzburg Castle.

The castle’s heyday came at the start of the sixteenth century under Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg when it functioned as a magnificent residence for the archbishop. After its destruction in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the ruins remained untouched for nearly 250 years.

In 1908, the art historian Max Sauerlandt (1880–1934) was appointed director of Halle an der Saale. Under his leadership, Sauerlandt began the systematic compilation and expansion of the collections. Sauerlandt recognized that he could not compete with the large collections in Berlin, Dresden or Munich, but he could turn the museum into something special by focusing on the art from the turn of the century and the present.

What began as a small collection of paintings, graphics and nineteenth-century handicrafts grew to an encyclopedic collection of approximately 250,000 paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, photographs, sculptures and design. Although the Moritzburg Art Museum maintains its focus as a museum of twentieth-century art in Germany, it also has a small number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Delftware objects. The most unique Delftware object is a vase decorated with a colorful and detailed merry company of men and women drinking tea. It is marked for Jacob Wemmersz. Hoppesteyn, the owner of Het Moriaenshooft (The Moor’s Head) factory from 1664 until 1671 or his widow Jannetge Claesdr. Van Straten, from 1680-1686.

The Musée Grobet-Labadié is located in a nineteenth century ‘hôtel particulier’ in Marseille in the south of France. The museum houses the collection of the Grobet-Labadié family, who originally owned the building. In 1919, Marie Grobet (1852-1944) gave the building and the family art collection to the city of Marseille.

Marie Labadié was the only daughter of the major Marseille businessman Alexandre Labadié (1814-1892). She was married to Bruno Vaysen, a notable owner of several castles and mayor of the French town Murs, and after his death remarried Louis Grobet, her music teacher and painter. From 1873 to 1917 she traveled through Europe successively with her first and then second husband in search of works of art. During these travels she was able to acquire more than seven thousand pieces to furnish her mansion. The objects collected by Marie and Louis Grobet are as numerous as they are varied: furniture, paintings, tapestries, sculptures, earthenware, rugs, silks and musical instruments. They are exhibited in the mansion, which has a ground floor and two floors served by a staircase itself decorated with paintings.

After the death of her second husband, childless, she decided to donate her family collection as well as the nineteenth-century mansion belonging to her to the city by deed of October 19, 1919. At the expense of the municipality the house had to be transformed into a museum. By deliberation of January 24, 1920, the city of Marseille accepted this donation. The museum was inaugurated on November 3, 1925 and opened its doors to the public in January 1926. Since that day, the city of Marseille has preserved the museum as well as its collection.

The beautiful rooms are fully furnished and decorated. Grobet also collected ceramics, for example plates and dishes from the Oiler’s factory in Moustiers and the Veuve Perrin factory in Marseille. Earthenware from Rouen and Japanese Imari porcelain are also included in the collection. A pair of blue and white double-gourd Delftware vases is also part of the collection.

The Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) is the oldest of its kind in Germany. The museum was founded as a private institution in 1867 and was based on the model of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was initially called the Deutsches Gewerbe-Museum zu Berlin (German Design Museum), and it sought to promote craftsmanship and support modern ideas on education as a ‘collection of models and studies’ for the associated artisan school.

The collection grew significantly in the 1870s, and it was renamed Kunstgewerbemuseum in 1879. To meet the needs of the collection, it moved to its own premises in 1881, the current Martin-Gropius-Bau. The museum later moved several more times, and parts of the collection were destroyed in World War II. The surviving objects were split between East and West Berlin. The reunification of Germany made it possible to reunite and reorganize the collection once again.

The collection of the Kunstgewerbemuseum encompasses a wide variety of materials and forms of craftwork, fashion and design. It houses European (and Byzantine) decorative arts from all post-classical periods of art history, and features gold, silver, glass and enamel items, porcelain, furniture, panelling, tapestry, costumes, and silks. In the ceramics collection one can also find Dutch Delftware, for example this blue and white ewer with gilded silver mounts. Decorated in an Asian style with birds and flowering plants, it is marked for Pieter Adriaensz. Kocx, the owner of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory from 1701 to 1703, or his widow Johanna van der Heul, the owner from 1703 to 1722.

 

Kunstgewerbe Museum Berlin, photo: Nynke Vanderven
Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, photo with thanks to Nynke Vanderven

The Musée national Adrien-Dubouché is located in Limoges, France, and contains the largest public collection of Limoges porcelain in the world. Founded in 1845 by Tiburce Morisot, father of Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, the first Limoges museum was initially housed in the premises of the prefecture of Haute-Vienne. The mission was to build a collection with paintings, sculptures and works of art collected by members of the Limousin Archaeological and Historical Society. Adrien Dubouché, son of a linen merchant, took over the voluntary management of the establishment in 1865 and expanded the collection with many donations from French and foreign ceramics factories. Under the direction of Dubouché, the museum moved to its current location to exhibit the collections and to accommodate a school of decorative arts.

In 1875, Dubouché acquired the 587-piece ceramic collection of the late Albert Jacquemart, author of the book Les Merveilles de la Céramique, which he donated to the city of Limoges. On the eve of Dubouché’s death in 1881, the museum and the school were nationalized. Since then, the museum was renamed the Musée national Adrien-Dubouché.

The museum houses the second richest collection of ceramics in France. Together with the Musée national de Sèvres it forms the Cité de la céramique Sèvres & Limoges. The museum preserves nearly 18,000 ceramics and glass from various periods, from Antiquity to the present day and from various civilizations: ceramics from Europe, Chinese porcelains, Islamic earthenware, stoneware pieces, and European porcelain from the seventeenth century to the present day. The collection also includes several seventeenth and eighteenth-century Delftware objects, from a beautiful floral plaque to figural salt cellars and many other tablewares such as teapots and ewers. A yellow so-called sample plate and a flower holder in the shape of a triumphal arch are absolute eye-catchers.

Originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, the museum’s first art gallery was dedicated for public use on November 5, 1895, and was initially housed in what is now the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

The museum’s name remained the same until 1963, when it was officially changed to Museum of Art, and once again in 1986 to its current name Carnegie Museum of Art. Several expansions have been made through the years to accommodate the growing collection, among other things the museum’s decorative arts holdings.

The museum stood apart from other institutions founded at the turn of the century. While most art museums focused on old master collections, Andrew Carnegie built his museum on the “Old Masters of tomorrow.” In 1896, he initiated a series of contemporary art exhibitions and proposed that the museum’s paintings collection be formed through purchases from this series. Carnegie, thereby, founded what is arguably the first museum of modern art in the United States. Early acquisitions of works by such artists as Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Camille Pissarro laid the foundation for the museum. Today, the Carnegie Museum of Art is distinguished in its American art, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and in significant late-twentieth-century works.

Over the past century, the museum has broadened its scope to include decorative arts and design, photography, film and video, Asian art, and African art. Although small, the museum also houses a collection of Delft tiles and a Delftware charger. The blue and white orangist charger inscribed KW v BT, MA KIN shows the portraits of King William III (Koning Willem van Brittanje, Mary Koningin) and his wife Mary. Chargers like these, with the Stadholder-King William III and his consort are the only Delft dishes with portraits known from the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The somewhat clumsy manner in which they are painted suggests that second-class pottery painters with only access to poorly drawn prints may have painted these chargers.

The Dresden Kunstgewerbemuseum is located within the Schloss Pillnitz, a Baroque palace approximately ten kilometers from Dresden. Founded in 1876, the museum was initially formed to instruct students, visitors, industrial producers and tradesmen about form and taste. The dissolution of guilds and the increasing industrialization led to a progressive deterioration of product quality, and the museum was founded as a state initiative to foster and develop the Saxon economy.

From 1914 onwards, it was run as an independent museum with an art-historical approach and ordered by stylistic period. Unfortunately, Dresden’s city center was heavily bombed during the Second World War, and many objects in the museum were either lost or destroyed. There was a lack of exhibition space in the years following the war, and in 1963 the collection was moved to Schloss Pillnitz. 

The Dresden Kunstgewerbemuseum houses approximately 60,000 objects that chronicle the history of design spanning five centuries. Pieces from the Middle Ages to the present, from Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland, but also Asia and South America are assembled here, ranging from furniture and textiles to musical instruments and vessels all the way to clocks and clock-faces.

The collection also includes approximately thirty Delftware objects, which are almost all painted in blue and white. The collection includes vases and ewers to dishes and even a flower holder in the shape of a triumphal arch marked for Lambertus van Eenhoorn, the owner of De Metaale Pot (The Metal Pot) factory from circa 1700.

 

The famous Musée d’Orsay is located in the former Gare d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900 on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. The majority of the museum collection includes French paintings, sculpture, furniture, and photography from 1848 to 1914. Visitors flock to the museum to view the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.

The museum collection includes two Cézanne paintings of a flower bouquet in a vase, Bouquet au petit Delft, 1873, and Dahlias dans un grand vase de Delft, 1873. Painters often used Delft flower vases for their floral still lifes. Remarkably, the Musée d’Orsay holds the two Delftware vases that Cézanne used. In Bouquet au petit Delft, Cézanne depicted a late seventeenth-century blue and white octagonal vase produced at De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory. In the other painting, an eighteenth-century blue and white ovoid vase was portrayed to hold the colorful dahlias.

Both the paintings and the Delftware vases were part of the Gachet collection. Dr. Paul Gachet was a French physician who famously treated Vincent van Gogh during his last weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise. Being an amateur painter himself, Gachet was a great supporter of artists and the Impressionist movement. Gachet was friends with and treated Pissarro, Renoir, Manet and above all Van Gogh and Cézanne, whose works he collected and the latter even helped him establish his own studio in his attic. He had amassed one of the largest Impressionist art collections in Europe before he died in 1909. Paul Gachet fils (1873–1962), the doctor’s son and namesake, preserved his father’s legacy by acting as biographer, as cataloguer and guardian of the legendary collection. Between 1947 and 1954 he donated the collection to the French state.

 

 

 

The Nationalmuseum, or the National Museum of Fine Arts is located on the Blasieholmen peninsula in central Stockholm. Founded in 1792 as Kungliga Museet (Royal Museum) with benefactors King Gustav III and Carl Gustaf Tessen, the museum was renamed when it opened in the current building in 1866.

The current building, built between 1844 and 1866, was inspired by North Italian Renaissance architecture and designed by the German architect Friedrich August Stüler, who also designed the Neues Museum in Berlin.

The Nationalmuseum’s collection contains approximately 700,000 objects ranging from paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints from the Renaissance through the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the renowned artists represented in the collection are Rembrandt, Rubens, Degas and Gauguin, but also many Swedish artists, such as Carl Larsson and Ernst Josephson. The museum’s collection of applied art, design and industrial design spans over a long period, from the fourteenth century to the present day. Ceramics consists of a third of the nearly 30,000 objects in this group, followed by textiles, glass, precious and non-precious metals, furniture, and books etc.

There are approximately one hundred objects of blue and white and polychrome Delftware in the applied art collection that span from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Plates, garnitures, jars and ewers to horses, cows and a figural cistern are among the objects represented. Interestingly, the collection holds several flower vases, both blue and white and of different models. For example, there is a late seventeenth-century blue and white bowl and cover flower vase, and an early eighteenth-century fanning flower vase with the depiction of Flora, marked for Lambertus van Eenhoorn, the owner of De Metaale Pot (The Metal Pot) factory from 1691 until 1721. The museum also has a polychrome fanning flower vase and a round-shaped flower vase, both marked for the same factory.

The Hallwyl Museum was once the palatial winter home of Count and Countess Walther and Wilhelmina von Hallwyl. Today it is one of Stockholm’s most eccentric and engaging museums.

The Swiss Walther von Hallwyl (1839-1921) was a scion of one of Europe’s oldest families, tracing its origins to the twelfth century. The Hallwyl ancestral seat was the Schloss Hallwil in Aargau. He married Wilhelmina Kempe (1844-1930), the only child of the Swedish industrial Wilhelm Kempe (1807-1883) in 1865 and made their home in Sweden. 

Wilhelmina became one of Sweden’s great collectors. She traveled the world extensively and collected art to eventually form a museum. The Hallwyl home was established not only to accommodate the count’s office, but for Wilhemina’s vast art collection. The house was built between 1893 and 1898, and was designed by Isak Gustaf Clason, the most renowned architect in Sweden at the time. Clason combined the Venetian Late Gothic style and Early Spanish Renaissance to create a Mediterranean “palazzo” in the center of Stockholm. He also used an eclectic approach to the interior of the home, with the main rooms decorated in a variety of styles. 

In 1920 the couple donated their Stockholm mansion together with its contents to the Swedish State. The terms of the bequest stipulate that the house must remain essentially unchanged. Eight years after Wilhelmina’s death, the Hallwyl Museum was first opened to the public in 1938. The collection encompasses some 50,000 objects, including several seventeenth and eighteenth-century Delftware objects. From garnitures and vases, among which a blue and white covered jar marked for Adrianus Kocx, the owner of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory from 1686 to 1701. Situated among the objets d’art are personal peculiarities including a chunk of the Count’s beard and a slice of their wedding cake.

 

Museum Catharijneconvent occupies a characteristic building in the old city center of Utrecht. The building has a long history going back to the fourteenth century. Originally, it was the site of a shelter for the homeless. In the fifteenth century, the Carmelites acquired the land and built a convent. Later, the knights of St. John turned it into a hospital, which it remained until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, it served various other functions until becoming a museum in 1979.

The museum has an extensive collection of special (art) historical objects from the early Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. The permanent collection provides a view of the Christian art and cultural history of the Netherlands and the influence of that history on society. The collection includes richly illustrated manuscripts, bindings decorated with precious stones, richly carved statues, paintings, altarpieces, church clothing and objects in gold and silver.

It also houses a collection of biblical Delftware and its forerunner majolica, of which a dish from circa 1600-1624 inscribed “Looft Godt” (Praise God) is an example. The Delftware collection comprises mainly biblical plates and dishes, but also plaques, holy water stoups and a home altar. All dishes and plates are painted with biblical scenes. For example a blue and white plate, marked for Jan Pennis who was the owner De Twee Scheepjes (The Two Little Ships) factory from 1750 to 1764, depicts the scene where Pilate washes his hands of guilt for Jesus’s death. Another blue and white charger, from 1718, depicts the half-length figure of Moses supporting two arched tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

 

 

Front Entrance, Clarke Square, National Museum of Ireland – Decorative Arts & History, Collins Barracks, Benburb Street, Dublin 7, photographed 13 August 2018

 

The National Museum of Ireland is divided into four branches: Archeology, Natural History, Country Life and Decorative Arts and History. Since 1997, the former military complex called Collins Barracks has been the site of the Decorative Arts and History Museum.

The Collins Barracks housed both British Armed Forces and Irish Army garrisons over three centuries. Built in 1702, and extended in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the complex’s main buildings are neoclassical in style. It was originally called The Barracks and later The Royal Barracks. Its name was changed in 1922 by the Irish Free Sate to its current name, in honor of Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, soldier, and politician, who had been killed earlier that year. Collins Barracks has been completely renovated and restored to become the National Museum of Decorative Arts and History, charting Ireland’s economic, social, political and military progress through the ages.

The collection includes furniture, silver, ceramics and glassware, but also examples of folk life, costumes and weapons. The ceramics collection mainly consists of ceramics originally collected to influence local ceramic industries and to illustrate the evolution of fine ceramics. It comprises continental European and British porcelain, Italian Maiolica, French faience, Hispano-Moresque ware and Dutch Delftware. The Dutch Delftware collection is particularly important in an Irish context, as its imitation of the Chinese decorative repertoire would later be repeated during the eighteenth century in Ireland. It includes vases and jars, but also a plate, tobacco jar, a cream pot, and a sleigh. The collection also holds several jugs, for example a blue and white one marked D4, which is painted with a snarling dragon amidst a profusion of flowering branches. This Chinese dragon pattern was taken from a Kangxi Period Chinese design, and was used on Dutch Delftware as early as the late seventeenth century and continued in popularity for many years.

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