Mysterious Ming is an exhibition at the Museum Princessehof which runs until 27th October 2013. Below is information about the museum. Click here for full details on our exhibitions page and scroll to 24 March.
The Museum
Princessehof collection is the most important collection of Asian ceramics in
the Netherlands. It is housed in three historical buildings in Leeuwarden, the
capital of the province of Friesland. They served in the eighteenth century as
the residence of the German princess Maria-Louise von Hessen-Kassel
(1688-1765), who married Johan Willem Friso of Oranje-Nassau (1687-1711) in
1709. A beautiful period room, decorated with Oriental porcelain displayed in
the contemporary fashionable style of Daniel Marot and once the original dining
room of Marie-Louise, has been preserved. It was only in the twentieth century
that these building were used as a museum.
The museum
was opened to the public in 1917 and was meant to foster the arts and crafts
traditions which united Europe and Asia. The collections displayed there were
based on the broad and profuse collections of a notary public from Leeuwarden,
Nanne Ottema (1874-1955) and his wife Grietje Kingma (1873-1950). Already as a
young man Nanne Ottema had developed a lively interest in a broad range of
collectibles, which grew to some 25,000 to 30,000 items according to his own
estimate. His interests lay particularly in Friesian cultural heritage and
Asian ceramics. Nanne Ottema became the museum’s first director and continued in
this position until his death in 1955. His interests in Chinese ceramics lead
him to begin systematic research on this subject. In 1943, his Handbook of Chinese Ceramics was
published.
With his
passion and his broad network of friends, dealers and collector, he had amassed
at that time some 4,000 pieces of Asian ceramics. A collection of Chinese
ceramics from the Ming period (1368-1644) in particular is of outstanding
quality and forms the core of the collection.
In 1973
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof reopened as a museum exclusively devoted to
ceramics –Asian as well as European- as the Nationale Nederlands
Keramiekmuseum, the Netherlands National Museum of Ceramics.
