The National Art Museum (Part 3)

The collection of the Department of Decorative Arts, which currently holds about 11,500 objects, was established after the nationalization of the royal collection and of several smaller private collections (among which the Kalinderu Museum was the most important). Over the years numerous gifts and purchases had enriched its patrimony. The permanent display of the department - inaugurated in 1978 - is now closed. However, in a couple of years time, the collection will be put on view in a gallery of decorative arts to be housed by the Museum. Meanwhile, exhibitions are enriched each year, based entirely on the department’s collections. The department’s holdings are structured by object classification.


King Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba
The textile collection of some 300 items, among which 100 tapestries, include exquisite creations of the Flemish workshops in Brussels (such as King Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba, the oldest tapestry in the collection), Oudenaarde and Lille, and of the French workshops in Beauvais and Aubusson.


Empress Elisabeth of Austria
The department also has approximately 300 miniature paintings, by famous European artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Jean Baptiste Isabey, Richard Cosway, Franz Xavier Winterhalter, as well as by well-known Romanian artists, such as Ion D. Negulici, Anton Chladek, Carol Popp de Szathmary.


Pair of decorative vases
A significant collection of ceramics and glassware with some 5,000 items documents the craftsmanship of designers and modelers in Faenza, Urbino, Delft, Sèvres, and Meissen. Alongside valuable glassware from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of particular interest are several unique Art Nouveau works by Emile Gallé, the Daum brothers, and René Lalique. About 1,000 pieces of furniture reflect the development and diversity of artistic styles in major West European countries.


Painted cassone – The Doge of Venice Receiving the Queen of Cyprus
The furniture collection of abour 1,000 pieces features mostly French furniture in the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles, and Art Nouveau furniture. It also contains some beautiful Italian pieces, representative of the Milanese workshops, as well as several German and Austrian Biedermeier ensembles.


Egg-shaped bonbonnière
Alongside jewelery, jade and ivory carvings, the department also has approximately 3,300 objects in silver, bronze or tin, and seventeenth- to nineteenth-century clocks, which make up a noteworthy collection of metalwork. Thirty-seven highlights from the collection are presented online, organized chronologically by object classification and country of origin (schools, workshops and artists).

(From MNAR)