Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, April, 2004 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Several years ago the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh acquired the Flemish ebony cabinet adorned with paintings on copper illustrated below. From this modest beginning (at the time it was the only piece of seventeenth-century northern European furniture in a collection that was much stronger in paintings), the museum set about to re-create a kunstkamer (collector's cabinet) evocative of those that were popular in Antwerp and elsewhere in Europe in the seventeenth century. To this end, and aided by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation's Old Masters in Context program, it has recently acquired a number of additional works of art and built a room to house them all, basing the installation on extensive research into inventories and other documents, paintings, and surviving period architecture.

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The concept of a collector's cabinet developed from the earlier humanist concept of the wonderkamer, a room in which were to be displayed vast and diverse collections of natural wonders, including all manner of plants, animals, and minerals, intended to represent a microcosm of all that existed in nature. By the late sixteenth century, such collections were expanded to include man-made marvels--such as paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts--that represented the idea of man and his creations as the center of God's universe. Perhaps the most spectacular of these collections was the collector's cabinet of Rudolf II in Prague, for which he commissioned thousands of priceless fine and decorative arts, including paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder, who is also represented in the North Carolina Museum's new installation.

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Smaller objects, such as jewelry, shells and coral, coins, and the like, were often kept in cabinets with many drawers, like the museum's ebony cabinet, which thus serves as both a piece of furniture and a work of art in its own right. The copper plaques ornamenting the cabinet are painted with scenes taken largely from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

More than twenty paintings hang in the room, including works by Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers II, as well as Brueghel. Above the ebony chest in the view of the room pictured at the left is Madonna and Child with Five Saints (c. 1618-1621), attributed to Anthony van Dyck. To its right are Portrait of a Gentleman (c. 1570), by Antonis Mor; The Bear Hunt (1639-1640), by Rubens and Frans Snyders; and (top to bottom) Pastoral Scene (c. 1665-1670), by Jan Sieberechts, Christ Healing the Blind Man (mid-1600s), by Lucas van Uden, and Brueghel's Harbor Scene with Saint Paul's Departure from Caesarea (1596). Typical, too, of collector's cabinets is the inclusion of the Greek second-century marble figure of Bacchus. The other objects in the room view on page 28 include a carved German seventeenth-century iron-bound strongbox; a mid-seventeenth-century Flemish oak side chair; and a Flemish seventeenth-century swing-leg oak and mahogany table, all purchased specifically for the room. On the table are some shells and two small sixteenth-century Italian bronzes.

In the corner of the room pictured on page 32 can be seen a portrait of Dr. Theodore Turquet de Mayeme (c. 1630), attributed to Rubens (left); a likeness of a child (c. 1645-1647), possibly Cosimo III de' Medici, painted by Justus Suttermans; and Landscape with a Bridge (c. 1600) by Joos de Momper the Younger. The Flemish oak cupboard below the latter dates from the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it too was recently acquired specifically for the room, as were the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch oak table with ebony inlay and the Dutch brass chandelier of about 1675.

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On the oak cabinet are two exquisite objects that represent the sort of small decorative arts that might have been in a collector's cabinet: a nautilus shell cup and a silver and parcel-gilt covered cup (Akeleypokal; see p. 30). The decoration of the nautilus cup (illustrated at right) is attributed to Cornelius van Bellekin of Amsterdam, a famous carver of shell, mother-of-pearl, and horn, as well as a painter: The decoration on the shell itself is based on designs found in Adriaan Collaert's Florilegium (Antwerp, 1590?); the stem and foot are carved marine oyster shells.

The printed word as a reflection of learning and knowledge was also an important element of a collector's cabinet, denoted at the North Carolina Museum of Art by the seventeenth-century Flemish bible illustrated on page 28.

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