Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Museums: Sweden

  • InstitutionsSwedish
  • Cultural Field
    Society
    Author
    Widén, Per
    Text

    In 1794 the Royal Museum opened its doors in the aftermath of the assassination of King Gustav III in 1792. The king’s collection of antiques was opened to the public in a wing of the royal palace by decree of the future King Karl XIII. The museum’s director was Carl Fredrik Fredenheim, an antiquarian, courtier and official who had conducted excavations in Rome’s Forum Romanum.

    The Royal Museum’s premises in the palace were soon found to be too small; after decades of parliamentary discussions, a new museum building was commissioned in 1845. The new museum, designed by the German architect Friedrich Stüler, was called Nationalmuseum and housed two other collections as well: Historiska Museet and Livrustkammaren.

    The post-Napoleonic period saw the emergence of Statens Porträttgalleri (National Portrait Gallery); it opened at the palace of Gripsholm in 1823. Presumably the first national portrait gallery in the world, it continued a traditionally-accumulated, publicly accessible portrait collection at Gripsholm. What was new was that the original emphasis on royal portraits, specifically with relation to the different Swedish dynasties, was now converted into a national collection of, as it was said, “meritorious citizens”. The gallery was created by the courtier and politician Adolf Ludvig Stierneld (1755–1835), known as the founder of Kungliga Samfundet för Utgivande av Handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens Historia (Royal Society for the Edition of Manuscripts on the History of Scandinavia, 1821) and notorious as a forger (he invented a fake ancestress to give himself a royal descent).

    Livrustkammaren, on the other hand, was a museification of parts of the royal collections and was part of the court until the mid-19th century. Livrustkammaren is perhaps the oldest museum in Sweden; it is dated back to 1628, when King Gustav II Adolf (1594–1632) is said to have ordered that the bloodstained clothes he had used during his Polish campaign should be kept “in the armoury as an eternal memorial”. This created an incitement for later monarchs, who consequently saved clothes and objects considered to be of special interest in the armoury. Like the portrait gallery of Gripsholm, Livrustkammaren was during the early 19th century reinterpreted as a museum of national importance celebrating Romantic heroes – especially the soldier kings Gustav II Adolf and Charles XII – rather than just a collection of things belonging to dead kings and queens.

    Besides Livrustkammaren, the 1866 Nationalmuseum also incorporated the collection of Nordic antiquities known as Historiska Museet. It contained the Swedish antiquities and archeological findings owned by the Vitterhetsakademien (Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities). The collections had been more or less accessible to the public since c.1800; in the 1840s the academy had opened a proper museum in central Stockholm under the supervision of the antiquarian Bror Emil Hildebrand (1806–1884).

    If the loss of Finland and the coup d’etat of 1809 had given the first impetus to create a set of museums with the ambition to represent and create the nation, the next challenge that led to the creation of new museums was, as in most countries, the industrialization of the late 19th century. The two museums that were created during this period, Nordiska Museet (National Museum of Cultural History) and the open-air museum Skansen, are interesting exceptions among the Swedish national museums, since they are not state-owned and were founded by an individual. Nordiska Museet was founded in 1873 by the linguist and collector Arthur Hazelius (1833-1901), who put up an exhibition in central Stockholm with the name Skandinavisk-Etnografiska Samlingen (Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection). In 1897, the museum moved to its present location at Djurgården in Stockholm. By then, Hazelius had also created the open-air museum Skansen, also at Djurgården. Both museums were dedicated to the ethnography and cultural history of Sweden. By letting workers and middle-class citizens get to know their agricultural roots, Skansen and Nordiska Museet were meant to have a patriotically unifying effect amidst the changes of industrialism. An additional aim to cover common Scandinavian elements is less in evidence today. During the first years, Hazelius himself privately owned Nordiska Museet and Skansen, but in 1880, the ownership was transferred to a foundation that is owned by the state but still controlled by an independent board of trustees.

    Word Count: 693

    Article version
    1.1.2.1/a
  • Beckman, Jenny; Naturens palats: Nybyggnad, vetenskap och utställning vid Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet 1866-1925 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1999).

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    Bursell, Barbro; Dahlberg, Anne Marie (eds.); 375 år med Livrustkammaren (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren, 2003).

    Bäckström, Mattias; Hjärtats härdar: Folkliv, folkmuseer och minnesmärken i Skandinavien, 1808-1907 (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2012).

    Bäckström, Mattias; “Loading guns with patriotic love: Arthur Hazelius’s attempt at Skansen to remake Swedish society”, in Knell, Simon; Aronsson, Peter; Brugge Amundsen, Arne (eds.); National museums: New studies from around the world (London: Routledge, 2010), 69-87.

    Rentzhog, Sten; Friluftsmuseerna: En skandinavisk idé erövrar världen (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2007).

    Söderlind, Solfrid; Olausson, Magnus; “The genesis and early development of the Royal Museum in Stockholm: A claim for authenticity and legitimacy”, in Preziosi, Donald; Farago, Claire J. (eds.); Grasping the world: The idea of the museum (Aldershot: Routledge, 2004), 572-599.

    Widén, Per; Från kungligt galleri till nationellt museum (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2009).

    Widén, Per; “Meritorious citizens in royal surroundings: The National Portrait Gallery of Sweden and its use of a historical environment as exhibition space”, Museum history journal, 8.1 (2015), 73-87.

    Widén, Per; “National museums in Sweden: A history of denied empire and a neutral state”, in Aronsson, Peter; Elgenius, Gabriella (eds.); Building national museums in Europe, 1750-2010 (Linköping: Linköping U Electronic P, 2011), 1039-1066.


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    All articles in the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe edited by Joep Leerssen are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.spinnet.eu.

    © the author and SPIN. Cite as follows (or as adapted to your stylesheet of choice): Widén, Per, 2022. "Museums: Sweden", Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (electronic version; Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, https://ernie.uva.nl/), article version 1.1.2.1/a, last changed 22-03-2022, consulted 29-03-2024.