Gallery: Estonian National Museum puts its silver collection on display
An exhibition titled "Estonian Silver Between the Wars: Well-Known and Lesser-Known Silversmiths, 1918–1944" opens Friday at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu.
More than 400 goldsmiths worked in Estonia between 1918 and 1944, ranging from master craftsmen who owned their own businesses and workshops to artisans who fulfilled orders for larger companies. The Estonian National Museum's (ERM) new exhibition, "Estonian Silver Between the Wars," showcases the craftsmanship, aesthetic sensibility and creative diversity of the country's goldsmiths during that period.
"In a young, newly independent country, there really was an extraordinary range of objects that simply had to be made of silver. Perhaps it was partly a feature of those early years that even the prize for every milking competition had to be made of silver," said Maris Klaas, head of content at ERM.
"When we think of goldsmiths today, we primarily think of jewelry, but back then they produced an enormous range of everyday objects. You could say it's a lost world. What surprised me about this period was just how many objects were made featuring scenes of Estonia. Whether it was a cigar box, a spoon handle or a shot glass, they would be engraved with a view of an Estonian city — Tartu, Tallinn, Narva, Viljandi and so on. I would never have imagined that making such objects was so popular," said exhibition curator Riina Reinvelt.
The exhibition was preceded by several years of research, during which thousands of archival records were examined and objects held in various collections were studied. It is the most comprehensive overview to date of the goldsmiths of this period, their lives and their work.
"The assay office's archives were destroyed in 1944 and nobody knew which maker's mark belonged to whom. We haven't managed to find an object bearing every maker's mark we know of. There were none in museum collections or private collections. I also kept an eye on the osta.ee online marketplace and some objects were actually purchased there for the museum's collection precisely because they bore a maker's mark for which no examples had previously been found. I think more discoveries will emerge," Reinvelt said.
The exhibition "Estonian Silver Between the Wars: Well-Known and Lesser-Known Silversmiths, 1918–1944" is on display in the Estonian National Museum's gallery from November 6 through August 29, 2027.
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Editor: Neit-Eerik Nestor, Lauraliis Jurkov, Johanna Alvin, Marcus Turovski
