Mööblikogu kui raam muuseumikollektsioonidele. Furniture collection - a frame for museum collections

Abstract

The furniture collection of the University of Tartu museum comprisesover 600 museum pieces. In addition to that, the museum managesthe cultural assets of the university, which also include some furniture,and maintains a database of it. When the Tartu State UniversityHistory Museum was founded in 1976, large-scale renovationsstarted in the university buildings, which led to a collection of olderfurniture accumulating in the museum.The furniture collection has some historic interior design elementsfrom the faculties, auditoriums, laboratories, offices, the assemblyhall and library, which date back to the 19th and 20th century.The collection has grown more than anticipated and is biggerthan the space at the museum allows. This has been inevitable forseveral reasons: elements of furniture reflect their era, describe contemporaryacademic lifestyle and work procedure. In comparison toother Estonian museums, the furniture collection of the University ofTartu Museum stands out for its university-specific elements, such aslarge cupboard-desks, cabinets with drawers and chests of drawerscharacteristic of laboratories. The historic collection cabinets, some ofwhich came to the museum with collections such as Johann FriedrichErdmann’s (1778–1846) pharmacological collection, Carl Schmidt’s(1822–1894) rock collection, and Johann Georg Dragendorff’s (1836–1898) pharmacy collection provide us a sense of the older history ofthe university. The museum has a varied collection of seat furniture(including lectern armchairs, stools from laboratories and chairsfrom auditoriums, dating back to the early 19th century). The piecesof historical office furniture are connected to many well-known lecturersand professors of the University of Tartu, such as a physicist Arturvon Oettingen (1836–1920), medics August Rauber (1841–1917),Ludvig Puusepp (1878–1942) and Albert Valdes (1884–1971), philologistand poet Gustav Suits (1883–1956), and others.The rooms of the old university library in the Dome Church, especially the Morgenstern hall, are decorated with historic furniture;cabinets brought in with curator Friedrich Maximilian Klinger(1752–1831) in the 19th century, book repositories designed and builtby the university architect Johann Wilhelm Krause (1757–1828),the personal book cabinet and desk of the library’s long-time directorKarl Morgenstern (1770–1852), and empire style armchairs withreplicas of antique bust sculptures.We know little about the makers of the university’s furniture.Local masters (Roger, Maibaum and others) are mentioned in theinventory books of the 19th century, but often the carpenters haveremained anonymous. Factory furniture prevailed at the turn of thecentury and in the first half of the 20th century; products of Thonet,A. M. Luther and others were the most popular. The Tartu IndustrialSchool often made practical pieces of furniture for the university aswell, offering their products for a lower price.These pieces of furniture are irreplaceable in displaying the university’shistoric interiors. The museum uses the historic pieces tostore as well as present its collections, which makes the university’shistoric furniture a sort of a frame to the museum collections