"16th - 17th ARTISTIC FURNITURE OF THE OLD INTERIORS"
(17th July, 2001 - October 2002)

The exhibition took place in Radvilos Palace 

The aim of this exhibition - to present to the public the 16th late 19th centuries historical furniture, which belonged to the nobility, gentry, rich townsfolk and gave splendour to the palaces, estates and houses, but failed to survive till our days.
The exhibition has been arranged in collaboration with the Lithuanian Collectors’ Association established in 1989, which coordinates the activities of collectors’ clubs in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda and other cities of Lithuania The authorities of the Lithuanian Collectors’ Association have kindly agreed to give on loan for the display some tens of greatly valuable pieces of museum furniture, and thus enabled the museum to feature an exposition embracing the development of artistic styles as thorough and diverse as possible and to include the pieces of historical furniture created not only in European countries but in the USA as well.
This exhibition bears a retrospective character. The organizers made an attempt to cover a wide period of artistic development - from the 16th to the end of the 19th century. The exposition includes pieces of secular household case and frame type furniture. The greatest part of them was created in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Germany, Austria, and another - in furniture-makers’ shops of France, England and Italy, i.e. in the countries which were the home of cosmopolitan artistic styles since olden times Artistic tendencies from them spread to the outlying region of Middle, North and East Europe and reached even the USA and other overseas countries. The exhibition presents furniture created in late Renaissance (late 16th- early 17th c.), Baroque (17th-1st half of the 18th c.), Rococo (2nd half of the 18th c.), Classicism (late 18th-early 19th c.), Empire and Biedermaier (1st half of the 19th c.) styles. The exposition also offers pieces of furniture, representing neostyles and Modern (2nd half of the 19th-early 20th c.)
The presented compositions featuring old artistic furniture displayed on two floors of the Radvila (Radziwill) family palace are enlarged by other fire and applied arts examples widening the perception of furniture styles. These are: painting, graphics, sculpture, tapestries, decorative.
Alongside Renaissance and Mannerism furniture, the exposition includes portraits from the same period - two portraits of unknown aristocratic ladies painted at various estates in Europe by the Flemish painter Frans Pourbus junior (1569-1622) and the portrait of Anna Ketler-Radziwill by an unknown Lithuanian painter. The latter work must have belonged to the collection of Nesvyžius (Nieswizh) castle or some other portrait collection owned by the Radvila family.
The Baroque halls are embellished with the landscapes, mythological and battle-scene compositions by the 17th-18th Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French and German painters. Of interest is the canvas The Fable about an Owl and Birds by Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-1695). Decorative, depicting birds compositions with their rich palettes and textures were admired by both aristocrats and wealthy burghers, who enjoyed no lower standards of life than aristocrats, and who kept in their parks local birds and those brought from some exotic countries. Lodovico Lipparini’s (1800-1856) monumental compositions Horaces Oalth, Achilles, Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s (1697-1764) greatly popular landscapes featuring the ruins of ancient Rome, Frans Xaver Lampi’s (1782-1852) somewhat sentimental canvases as well as the portraits painted by the popular painters in Europe Jean Laurent Mosnier (1744-1808) and Carl Vogel von Vogelstein (1788-1868) are perfectly in tune with Classicism furniture.
The exposition is enriched by West European artists’ graphic works, which originally reflect the peculiarities of the development of art between the 16th to the 19th century. Though graphic art emerged and functioned as book illustration, with the growth of the formats of engravings, it became part of man’s dwelling. The reproduced prints became available to the majority of people interested in art, and were rapidly spreading in everyday life.
The museum collections boast a great many of Baroque, Rococo and Classicism period graphic works, which impart a sensation of the whole to the interior. The mezzotint technique, perfected in England, disclosed itself in John Eginton’s (19th c.) pictorially soft works. It was popularized by Samuel Reynolds (1773-1835), who favoured subtle lighting. Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778), a romantic Roman bard, legalized a unique genre of the city vedute (architecturescape). He etched majestic Italian architectural ensembles, exploiting the media close to painting. Flemish graphic artists followed their own individual path of Northern renaissance. Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), an outstanding engraver of the early 16th century, combined freely small separate scenes into an epic biblical narration in his engravings “Magdalene’s Dance” and ”St Paul”. Of special interest to the visitor are salon etchings executed in the style of Ludwig XIV - erotic scenes featuring flirting and flattering were particularly favoured by the French engravers Rene Gaillard (1719-1790), Louis Debucort (1755-1832), and Augustin le Grand (1765-1815). The restrained, coldish representational portraits of public figures and scientists created by the German painters Anton Tischler (1721-1780), Bernigeroth (18th c.) and Bartolomaeus Hübner (1727-1795) served as a kind of equilibrium in respect of this somewhat flippant trend of the French graphic art.

 

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