Nordic Museum
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The Nordic Museum (in Swedish Nordiska museet), Stockholm, is dedicated to the cultural history and ethnography of Sweden from the Early Modern age (which for purposes of Swedish history is said to begin in 1520) until the contemporary period. The museum was founded in the late 19th century by Artur Hazelius, who also founded the open-air museum Skansen, for long part of the museum, until the institutions were made independent of each other in 1963.
The Museum was originally (1873) called the Scandinavian ethnographic collection (Skandinavisk-etnografiska samlingen), from 1880 the Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museum, now Nordiska museet). When Hazelius established the open-air museum Skansen in 1891, it was the second such museum in the world.
For the Nordic museum, Hazelius bought or managed to get donations of objects – furniture, clothes, toys etc. – from all over Sweden and the other Nordic countries; he was mainly interested in peasant culture but his successors increasingly started to collect objects reflecting bourgeois and urban lifestyles as well. For Skansen he collected entire buildings and farms.
Although the project did not initially get the government funding he had hoped, Hazelius received widespread support and donations, and by 1898 the Society for the promotion of the Nordic Museum (Samfundet för Nordiska Museets främjande) had 4,525 members. The riksdag, the Swedish parliament, allocated some money for the museums in 1891 and doubled the amount in 1900, the year before his death.
The building for the museum, designed by Isak Gustaf Clason, was built 1888-1907, with about half of the present building being finished for the Stockholm Exposition 1897; it was never completed to the extent originally planned, about four times the actual final size. It takes its influences from the Dutch-influenced Danish renaissance architecture (e.g. Frederiksborg Palace) rather than any Swedish models.
[edit] External links
- Nordiska museet, official website
