Art - Overview
The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 108 items.
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[Art in Germany: stereo photonegative,] 1901
- Notes
- Envelope: "Germany 1901"
- Currently stored in box 1.1.16 [42] ], moved from [182]
- Orig. No. 644-2
- Summary
- Church interior with altar
- Date
- 1901
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- H.C. White Co
- Local number
- RSN 3234
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Shell room, New Palace, Potsdam, inlaid with precious curios--apartment of Kaiser. 1354 Interpositive 1905
- Notes
- Similar to RSN 12667
- Currently stored in box 3.2.6 [185]
- Date
- 1905
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- photographer
- Abbegg
- Subject
- Kaiser
- Local number
- RSN 20101
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Shell room, New Palace, Potsdam, inlaid with precious curios--apartment of Kaiser. 1354 Interpositive 1905
- Notes
- Similar to RSN 12667
- Currently stored in box 3.2.6 [185]
- Date
- 1905
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- photographer
- Abbegg
- Subject
- Kaiser
- Local number
- RSN 20102
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Raphael's Madonna of the Tempi family, Art Museum at Munich, Germany. 10662 interpositive 1910
- Notes
- Currently stored in box 3.2.37 [136]
- "Apr 1910 CB MS" on envelope
- Date
- 1910
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- Local number
- RSN 24253
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Throne Room, Royal Palace, Berlin with plate-laden sideboard and regal decorations. 1293 Interpositive
- Notes
- Similar to RSN 12595, 12596, 2230, 2231 and 25639
- Currently stored in box 3.2.6 [185]
- Date
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- Subject
- Imperial Palace (Berlin, Germany)
- Local number
- RSN 20042
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Imperial picture gallery along N.W. side palace, Berlin, overlooking the gardens. 1294 Interpositive
- Notes
- Similar to RSN 2232 and 12579
- Currently stored in box 3.2.6 [185]
- Date
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- Subject
- Imperial Palace (Berlin, Germany)
- Local number
- RSN 20043
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Red Eagle room, Imperial Palace, Berlin, where Kaiser awards national honors. 1332 Interpositive 1905
- Notes
- Similar to RSN 12647
- Currently stored in box 3.2.6 [185]
- Date
- 1905
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- photographer
- Abbegg
- Subject
- Imperial Palace (Berlin, Germany)
- Local number
- RSN 20084
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Bismarck and the Emperor of Austria. 1463 Interpositive
- Notes
- Currently stored in box 3.2.7 [188]
- Date
- 1900-1910
- publisher
- Underwood & Underwood
- Subject
- Bismarck Chancellor
- Local number
- RSN 20148
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
Meissen bowl
- Description
- This rinsing bowl is part of the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of European Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychoanalysis and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
- The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
- This bowl was once part of a tea and coffee service onto which were painted topographical scenes of Saxon places of interest. Featured on the bowl is the Königstein Fortress, built on the top of the rocky prominence in the center left of the image, which lies south of Dresden close to the river Elbe seen on the right. The fortress, which still exists, stands on an outcrop of sandstone sculpted over millenia by the waters of the Elbe, and it is situated in a region unique to this part of south-eastern Germany known as Saxon Switzerland, later to become a landscape fascinating to early nineteenth century painters like Caspar David Friedrich. The second painting depicts the Sonnenstein castle above the town of Pirna, which lies south-east of Dresden on the banks of the Elbe. In the sixteenth century Pirna flourished as a merchant town, and was a center for Protestant minorities seeking refuge from persecution in Catholic Central Europe. Bernardo Belotto/Caneletto (1721-1780), the nephew of Giovanni Antonio Caneletto (1697-1768), his pupil and assistant in Venice before leaving to study in Rome, painted several scenes of Pirna, but at the Meissen Manufactory both these images, painted in onglaze enamels, were after engravings executed in 1726 by Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752). Thiele painted many landscapes of Saxon sites, and among his pupils were artists who later developed what became known as the Dresden landscape school, active until well into the nineteenth century. The bowl is an example of Meissen’s use of sources from the work of contemporary artists, an exchange made possible through the increasing volume of prints supplied to the manufactory. (Marx, H., Die Schoensten Ansichten aus Sachsen: Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752) zum 250 Todestag, 2002).
- The bowl has a sea-green ground color, and the images in the reserves are painted in polychrome enamels. The interior and exterior gold scrollwork and foot ring frame the piece. The interior has another miniature landscape that remains unidentified and is probably imaginary, surrounded by elaborate scrollwork in purple and iron-red enamels and gold. When part of a tea and coffee service, the bowl was used to take the last dregs of a beverage before a cup was rinsed and refilled. It is likely that a service of this kind was not much used in a practical sense, but put on display for admiration. (See a milk pot from this service in Pietsch, U., Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, 2011, p.379).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1735
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- 1983.0565.43
- collector/donor number
- 893
- accession number
- 1983.0565
- catalog number
- 1983.0565.43
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Mortar
- Description
- This bell-shaped eide mouth bronze mortar has five vertical gothic-style ribs at the waist. A single semi-circular is applied at the waist.
- Urdang catalogued this mortar as Germanic, early 15th century.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- ID Number
- 1991.0664.0087
- catalog number
- M-05640
- accession number
- 1991.0664
- collector/donor number
- SAP 352
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
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