Homenews

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.

In Saint Petersburg, Russia, a series of palaces and gardens is located named The Peterhof Palace. It was commissioned by Peter the Great as a direct response to the Palace of Versailles by Louis XIV of France. Originally intending it in 1709 for country habitation, Peter the Great sought to expand the property as a result of his visit to the French royal court in 1717, inspiring the nickname of “The Russian Versailles.”

Throughout the early 18th century, Peter the Great built and expanded the Peterhof Palace complex as a part of his goal to modernize and westernize Russia. In 1714, Peter began construction of the Monplaisir Palace based on his own sketches. Completed in 1723, ‘Monplaisir’ is the magnificent palace located directly on the short of the Gulf of Finland. The palace design reflects the Tsar’s unique individuality, as he conceived the entire construction with sketches and schematic drawings of the exterior, interior layout, and some elements of the decorative finishes. Peter’s aesthetic taste and interests are revealed in the palace’s Dutch architecture. In fact, the palace is sometimes called ‘The Dutch house.’ 

Monplaisir became Peter’s preferred retreat, where he entertained only his closest friends and advisors. The interior rooms are almost entirely paneled in oak, and adorned with seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, of which the majority belongs to the Tsar’s original collection. Further, a large lacquer cabinet accommodated the Tsar’s highly prized collection of Chinese porcelain. The cabinet walls are decorated with large black-lacquer panels, with miniature chinoiserie-style paintings. The porcelain was displayed on the shelf-consoles attached between the panels, a prominent position that exemplified their importance to the owner.

In 1697, the Tsar visited Amsterdam and Delft, where he met with the inventor of the microscope, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. He undoubtedly became interested in Delftware during his travels, as he purchased one hundred thousand tiles to decorate his palaces in St. Petersburg, amongst others the kitchen in Monplaisir Palace. It did not stop with tiles; he also acquired a Delftware fan-shaped flower vase that is nowadays on view in Monplaisir Palace. 

Koldinghus is a Danish royal castle located in the town of Kolding on the Jutland peninsula. The castle was first built in 1268 by the Danish king to guard the border between the kingdom of Denmark and the duchy of Schleswig. Since the thirteenth century, the castle has expanded to include a range of functions, from fortress, royal residency, ruin, museum, and the location of numerous wartime negotiations. Today, the restored castle is a museum containing collections of furniture from the sixteenth century to present, Roman and Gothic church culture, Danish paintings, silver and ceramics.

The ceramics collection is displayed in the library reading room of the west wing, which was built in 1475 as the main building in the medieval castle. After earlier reconstructions, the library reading room was fitted out with columns, galleries and bookcases. Nowadays, the showcases exhibit porcelain from Asia, Germany, France and Denmark and faience from Germany, France, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. An entire showcase is dedicated to Delftware from the early seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. It contains many plates and chargers, but also two spice wine bowls, several jugs and vases. One of the highlights of the Delftware collection is an early gadrooned ‘Straetwerck’ dish, painted with an angel in yellow, blue and manganese. The exceptional dish was probably produced in the Northern Netherlands around 1650.

Colonial Williamsburg is a living-history museum located in Williamsburg, Virginia. The designated historic district surrounding the museum contains buildings from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries making it a national treasure. Williamsburg was the thriving capital of Virginia for 81 formative years, from 1699 to 1780, when the colonies developed into a rich and powerful land stretching west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes. Williamsburg was the political, cultural, and educational center of what was then the largest, most populous, and most influential of the American colonies.

In 1926, the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church, shared his dream of preserving the city’s historic buildings with philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., and the restoration began. Rockefeller and Goodwin began a modest project to preserve a few of the more important buildings. Eventually, the work progressed and expanded to include a major portion of the colonial town, encompassing approximately 85 percent of the eighteenth century capital’s original area.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s many treasures include its outstanding collections. They encompass nearly 70,000 examples of American and British fine, decorative and mechanical art; 5,000 pieces of American folk art; more than 20 million archaeological artifacts; and 15,000 architectural fragments. Many of the collections furnish more than 200 rooms in Williamsburg’s historic buildings. The collections are also displayed in the art museums of Colonial Williamsburg: the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. Opened in 1985, the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum is home to an extensive collection of American and British antiques. The collection comprises furniture, metals, paintings, firearms, textiles, glass and ceramics from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Colonial Williamsburg’s ceramics and glass collections encompass more than 11,000 objects ranging in date from the seventeenth century through the 1830s. The majority of objects reflect the wares that were made in or imported to America during the colonial and early national periods. Although the collection is particularly strong in English Delftware, there are also several Dutch Delftware objects. A true highlight is a pair of large flower pyramids, marked for Adrianus Kocx of De Grieksche A (The Greek A) factory at the end of the seventeenth century.