Homenews

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.

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.

The Gardiner Museum is Canada’s national museum of ceramics. It is one of a small number of specialized museums of ceramics in the world. The museum was established by George and Helen Gardiner in Toronto in 1984. The Gardiners started their ceramics collection in the mid-1970s with pre-colonial pottery from the Americas and Meissen porcelain. Eventually, the collection grew to include Italian maiolica, English Delftware, and European porcelain. In the early 1980s, the Gardiners wished to exhibit their collection at the Royal Ontario Museum, but faced complications that eventually led them to open their own institution.

The Gardiner Museum contains over 4,000 objects from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The holdings highlight important developments in the history of European earthenware, including tin-glazed earthenware, English slipware, and creamware. Although the institution is primarily a ceramics museum, the permanent collection also includes a number of non-ceramic pieces that directly relate to the ceramic pieces in the collection.

The collection is divided into two principal areas: porcelain and earthenware. The museums’ porcelain collection primarily focuses on European porcelain, whereas its earthenware collection is primarily made up of ceramics from pre-colonial Americas, Italian maiolica, and Delftware. The majority of the Delftware collection is formed by English Delftware, but the museum also holds several Dutch Delftware objects. From Kraak-style chargers, to polychrome plates and even a so-called Jan Steen jug. These blue and white ovoid jugs, from circa 1640, are depicted on the paintings Het Oesteretertje (Girl Eating Oysters) and Het Doktersbezoek (The Doctor’s Visit) by Jan Steen. Another interesting object is a red stoneware figure of a harlequin, which was made at De Metaale Pot (The Metal Pot) factory around 1710.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts is located in the city of Lille in northern France. It was one of the first museums built in France, established under Napoleon I at the beginning of the nineteenth century as part of the popularization of art. An 1801 decree designated fifteen French cities, including Lille, to receive works taken from the collections of the Louvre and Versailles, “after a gallery suitable for receiving them will have been arranged, at the municipality’s expense”. The collections were also seized from churches and territories occupied by armies of Revolutionary France. The museum in Lille then contained 46 paintings.

The museum opened in 1809 and was initially housed in a church before being transferred to the city’s town hall. When the town hall became too small to house the collection, a larger premises was needed, however the city did not have adequate funds to finance a building project. To raise money, the mayor held a lottery: five million tickets, to be sold for one franc each, were printed to finance the project. Unfortunately, the tickets did not sell well and the lottery was a failure. Only slightly more than half of the expected total was raised. Nevertheless, the construction of the museum began, but was halted when money ran out. As a result, the final museum, opened in 1892, was only half of the initial design.

Despite the reduced size, the Palais des Beaux-Arts is one of the largest art museums in France. It is dedicated to antiquities from the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, paintings from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, sculptures, prints and drawings, plan-reliefs and ceramics. The ceramics collection holds more than 2,500 objects that range from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. It includes maiolica, Chinese porcelains, French porcelain, and earthenware from Lille, Rouen and Delft. The large Delftware collection includes blue and white and polychrome objects from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, from plates, ewers, tea canisters to butter tubs, plaques, money boxes and flower vases. One of the highlights in the Delftware collection is a pair of polychrome flower holders with fanning rows. 

The Van Gijn House is located in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. The original house was first built in 1729 for Johan van Neurenberg, a wealthy regent. Simon van Gijn, a lawyer and banker born in 1836, purchased the house with his wife in 1864. The couple lived in the house until his death in 1922. Van Gijn left the house and most of his collections to the Old Dordrecht Society. His wish was for the collection to be made publicly accessible and for his home to be converted into a museum, maintaining the interior in its original state as much as possible. Since 1925, the house has been open to the public, allowing visitors to experience upper class living during the nineteenth-century.

As a typical nineteenth-century collector, Van Gijn had wide-ranging interests, from historical prints, weapons and ships to coins, silver, paintings, glass and ceramics. Van Gijn’s collection was prominently displayed in the house for visitors to admire the collection. Following his death, the collection continued to grow due to donations, bequests and purchases.

Both porcelain and earthenware from all over the world are represented in the ceramics collection. Van Gijn also collected Delftware, such as plates, jugs, vases. Some of the highlights on display are a blue and white herring dish, jugs, dishes and two blue and white five piece garnitures, one marked for De Porceleyne Klaauw (The Porcelain Claw) factory and the other for De Vergulde Blompot (The Gilt Flowerpot) factory. Another remarkable object is this polychrome fan-shaped flower vase. Painted in the cashmere palette, which was highly en vogue around 1710, the vase shows an intriguing scene of a Chinese person and a mythological beast.

Castle Sypesteyn was built by Sir Henry van Sypesteyn (1857-1937) on old foundations in Loosdrecht during the early twentieth century. Surrounded by canals and a beautiful garden, the sumptuous castle and its interiors remain largely intact from when van Sypesteyn left it.

The van Sypesteyn family amassed their wealth through the cloth trade beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. The land on which the castle stands was first purchased by the family in the seventeenth century. An existing house was renovated by the family, but later destroyed during a war. The land was then leased to farers and sold to a farmer in the early nineteenth century. Around 1900, Sir Henry van Sypesteyn purchased his ancestral land, and planned to rebuild the family castle that once stood there. The castle was a reflection of his distinguished family, and served to display van Sypesteyn’s extensive art collection.

Henry developed an interest in history and passion for collecting from his father, who had a varied collection from coins and tokens to family portraits and documents. Growing up amongst these objects, Henry became a fanatic collector himself. Henry developed an encyclopedic collection including family portraits, weapons, silver, glass, clocks and ceramics. He even designed the castle with appropriate building materials, trees, plants and garden ornaments to convey a credible historical appearance.

The van Sypesteyn ceramics collection includes both Dutch and Asian porcelain. The Delftware collection ranges from plates and chargers to jugs and vases. It also houses a rare blue and white garniture set, an interesting blue and white cuspidor and a so-called crespina possibly made by the Verstraeten family in the city of Haarlem. Another rare highlight is a blue and white flower holder modeled as a Chinese lady marked for Pieter Adriaansz. Kocx of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory from circa 1705.