Homenews

In 1689, Queen Mary II and King William III moved from the Netherlands to England. Mary, who had a keen passion for Delftware, continued ordering beautiful objects and highly contributed to spread the fashion in her new homeland. Thus, after the Glorious Revolution, aspiring courtiers expressed their loyalty toward the Dutch Royal couple by collecting Delftware. This explains why today, many of the most delicate Delftware pieces can be found in Britain. For both connoisseurs and amateurs, Dyrham Park (Gloucestershire) and its magnificent seventeenth century mansion house is definitely worth a visit.

Dyrham Park was created in the late seventeenth century under the initiative of the court administrator William Blathwayt (1649-1717). His competences and ability to speak Dutch lead him at the head of the diplomatic service and the army under William III’s personal supervision. Owing to his royal connections, the mansion house became a showcase for sumptuous Dutch decorative objects. In this beautiful interior decorated with wood paneling and Dutch tiles an impressive collection of ceramics is displayed. A 1710 household inventory shows that William Blathway’ Delftware collection was certainly one of the most important in Britain.

Two magnificent pyramidal flower vases that are recorded in the inventory are today displayed in the Diogenes Room. In one of the adjoining rooms, a beautiful blue and white basket is also on view.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world’s largest museum of decorative art and design. Founded on the following day of the Great Exhibition in 1851 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the museum is located in an area that has become known as “Albertopolis”, which gathers a group of museums and educative institutions.

For the greatest joy of amateurs and connoisseurs, the institution houses the most comprehensive and impressive collection of ceramics in the world, with over 80,000 objects from all around the planet that encompass the history of fine ceramic production from about 2500 BC to the present day.

Dutch Delftware is well represented, with about 300 magnificent pieces on view. The Delftware collection covers a wide spectrum of objects from the Dutch Golden Age. In 1909, the impressive ceramic collection of the Australian millionaire George Salting was donated to the museum. More than thirty Delftware pieces that previously belonged to the famous art collector can be contemplated by the museum visitors. Amongst them appears a very rare Imari box marked for Pieter Adriaensz. Kocx, the owner of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory from 1701 until 1703. The box was probably intended to serve as a receptacle for salt and pepper.

One of most admired piece of the museum is a magnificent pair of blue and white pyramidal tulipieres from 1695. Contrary to the general belief, vases with spouts were not only intended to display tulips but all kinds of flowers. They were highly decorative additions to palaces and country houses.

As early as 1740 under the influence of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV and an influential figure in the art field, a porcelain factory was installed in one of the towers of the royal Château de Vincennes. In 1756 the factory moved to a building in Sèvres, where it still exists as a museum. The founder of the Musée national de Céramique was factory director Alexandre Brongniard (1770-1847), who had the ambition to broaden the knowledge regarding ceramics, and inaugurated the first museum that was entirely dedicated to ceramics and glass in 1800. Therefore, since its creation, the museum has the vocation to gather, protect and display the ceramics of all periods and places. Today, the institution has assembled more than 50,000 objects, of which at least 300 pieces of Dutch Delftware.

The first Delftware objects entered the museum in 1829. The Parisian art dealer Vachée gave the museum some Delftware objects in exchange to some Sèvres Porcelain pieces. The collection then expended through purchases and donations. From 1835, Brongniard set out several journeys, notably in the Netherlands and in Germany, that lead to the purchase of some exceptional Delftware pieces like this beautiful ‘Cashmire’ teapot marked PAK for Pieter Adriaensz. Kocx, the owner of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory.

Interestingly, the Delftware acquisitions retrace the evolution of the production in the city of Delft and its influence amongst the production of ceramics in Europe. The museum intents to demonstrate the primary importance Delft had in the history of ceramics.

After a thorough renovation, the largest Czech museum dedicated to applied art and design reopened last February. Founded in 1885, the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts (Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum v Praze or UPM) is housed in a Neo-Renaissance edifice built from 1897 to 1899. Before this building was erected, the museum was housed in the newly built Rudolfinum building, whose construction was sponsored by the Czech Savings Bank. In 1885 the Chamber of Trade and Commerce decided to erect a separate building for the Museum. The new premises, designed by the architect Josef Schulz, was built in Prague’s Jewish quarter. The construction of the museum is a combination of various historical styles and its opulent interior was designed with richly decorated ceiling and antique furniture.

The museum collects historical objects, contemporary arts and crafts, applied arts and design. The collection numbers approximately half a million items and includes glass, ceramics and porcelain, graphic art and photography, furniture, woodwork and metalwork, gold and jewelry, clocks and watches, textiles and fashion, and children’s toys.

The museum has collected Delftware since its founding, and has since been enlarged by the Lanna bequest and through other important purchases. The most significant additions to the collection of Delftware occurred after the Second World War, when the museum acquired large collections from several chateaux as well as private owners. Many titled families, of both Czech and foreign birth, filled their homes with late seventeenth century Delftware, as can be seen in the many objects that fill Bohemian and Moravian castles and chateaux. The varied range of Delftware objects in the museum collection comprises table wares such as plates, salt cellars, tea canisters, spice bowls, but also objects as vases, a pair of obelisks, plaques, garnitures and figures such as models of cows. The collection also holds a round flower holder produced at De Grieksche A factory, under the ownership of Samuel van Eenhoorn. Other highlights are a late seventeenth-century pyramidal flower vase and a pair of bowl-shaped flower vases, marked for Adrianus Kocx of De Grieksche A factory, and a pyramidal flower vase.

Erddig Hall is a stately country house located on the outskirts of Wrexham in Wales. It was built in 1683-1687 by the Cheshire mason Thomas Webb for Joshua Edisbury, High Sheriff of Denbighshire, whose building ambitions bankrupted him in 1709. John Meller, a successful London lawyer, bought up the debts of Joshua Edisbury. Once he had purchased Erddig, he set about furnishing his new house with the very best furniture and fabrics and added two-storey wings, his ‘rooms of parade’ between 1721 and 1724. With no wife or children, Meller looked to his sister’s son, Simon Yorke, to supervise the completion and delivery of his valuable new furnishings for Erddig. Upon Meller’s death in 1733, the house was inherited by Simon Yorke I. Erddig was owned by the Yorke family for 240 years, until the National Trust took ownership in 1973.

The Neoclassical interiors include fine examples of eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper and a chapel with late eighteenth-century fittings. With a total of 30,000 objects, Erddig has the second largest collection of objects in the whole of the National Trust. It houses a collection of seventeenth through nineteenth-century paintings and important furniture. Some outstanding examples include gilt pier-glasses, gilt girandoles and a State Bed, all attributed to John Belchier from the 1720s; and dining room furniture by Gillows of Lancaster from 1827. Further, there is a collection of ceramics, such as porcelain from Chelsea and Worcester. The greatest of Erddig’s ceramic treasure is however a splendid seventeenth-century Delftware vase created for one of William and Mary’s palaces by De Grieksche A factory, under the ownership of Adrianus Kocx. The vase bears the royal arms above the Dutch royal motto “Je maintiendray.” Typical of unusually shaped ceramic objects, this garden urn was copied from an example made in precious metal. For most of the previous century, the vase has been housed in the Saloon, prominently displayed on a pedestal in the center of the room.

Skokloster Castle is considered one of the great baroque castles of Europe, situated on a peninsula in Lake Mälaren, 60 km northwest of Stockholm, the Swedish capital. Built between 1654 and 1676 for Count Carl Gustaf Wrangel, it is a monument to the Swedish Age of Greatness, the period in the middle of the seventeenth century when Sweden expanded to become one of the major powers in Europe. After the death of Count Wrangel in 1676, the castle was never fully completed. The banquet hall still stands unfinished and many of the original construction tools remain. The rest of the castle has also remained amazingly untouched for more than 300 years.

Margareta Juliana, Wrangel’s eldest daughter, married Count Nils Brahe, a member of Sweden’s most exalted non-royal family. On her initiative Skokloster was made an Entailed Estate in 1701, which is a form of ownership that prohibits the owner from selling or giving away any part of the estate. The estate and its collections have thus been allowed to grow through the years.

Carl Gustaf Wrangel created a stately home of European style. Like his contemporaries, Wrangel endeavored to understand the world by collecting art and antiques as well as specimens from nature. The castle’s detailed chambers are home to remarkable collections of paintings as well as furniture, textiles, silver and glass, and pottery. The castle armory and library are particularly noteworthy. Altogether there are around a couple of thousand items, for both practical use and ornament. The objects represent places of manufacture in several different countries as well as centuries. Wrangel not only commissioned shiny gilt leather hangings for the state apartments and tools for his lathe workshop from Holland, he probably also purchased Dutch Delftware from Holland as a cabinet filled with seventeenth-century Delftware chargers, bowls and boxes shows. A true highlight are two blue and white ring-jugs with pierced openwork and chinoiserie decorations made around 1665.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) comprise two separate museums: the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. Together they form the largest public arts institution in San Francisco and one of the largest art museums inthe United States. Where the De Young Museum shows mostly American paintings, which feature more than 1,000 works dating from colonial to contemporary times, The Legion of Honor offers unique insights into the art historical, political, and social movements of the previous 4,000 years of human history.

The collection at the Legion of Honor comprises amongst others European painting, ancient art, photography, works on paper, and European sculpture and decorative arts. Where the decorative arts collection began with French eighteenth-century furniture, porcelain and other objects, it now ranges in scope from late medieval to modern times and covers many other regions of Europe.

The museum’s ceramics collection comprises several Delftware objects, from eighteenth-century ‘Peacock’ and ‘Tea tree’ plates and Orangist Delftware plates with the depiction of the Prince of Orange, to ewers, a garniture set, and a red stoneware teapot from Ary de Milde. The collection also houses a seventeenth-century tazza marked for Samuel van Eenhoorn, who was the owner of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory from 1678 to 1687, and a pair of blue and white flower vases, which are marked for Adrianus Kocx, the owner of the same factory from 1687 until 1701. The vases, which stand almost 40 in. (101 cm.) tall, are painted with representations of the virtues on the pedestal sides. The monstrous spouts of the tiers are decorated with putti or birds in a landscape. The unusual shape of the vases, their height and the decoration of European and oriental elements, make the pair of vases a true highlight.