Period rooms in The Nordiska Museet
Many museums in Sweden have installed period rooms during the 20th century. First of all was The Nordiska Museet i Stockholm. To the inauguration of the new museum building in 1907 a complete series of period rooms from Renaissance to Art-nouveau was opened.
Artur Hazelius, the founder of The Nordiska Museet and Skansen, opened already in the 1880s a Rococo drawing-room. There are also, from the same time, some notations left from Hazelius’ hand about a series of rooms and milieus from Romanesque to Empire style. Those were meant for the new museum building which Hazelius had started planning together with the architect I.G. Clason. When Hazelius suddenly died in the spring 1901, there were no concrete plans for the disposition of the new museum building. His interest and energy had for the last ten years been laid to the development of Skansen even if the raising of the new building slowly continued.
In 1905 the museum board decided to open the new building in the summer 1907. The director, Bernhard Salin, who was a trained scientist, regarded it as an obligation towards Hazelius to create this series of period rooms, to educate the museum visitors how people of the upper classes had lived during the last centuries. Interiors from farm-houses were also planned.
Salin stated the museum as a scientific institution ”free from romantic and national education”. Archaeology and art history had already passed through making science of their subjects and now it was time for folk life researchers and museum curators to turn professional.
There were no complete interiors in the collections of The Nordiska Museet. Therefore, the curators themselves had to create those period rooms which the museum had decided to exhibit. Salin and his assistants were fully aware of the fact that these rooms were not and had never been real rooms.
In the collections there were parts of room interiors, especially from Stockholm, from different social classes and periods, but no furniture from these rooms. The curators had to study interiors in castles, manors and noblemen’s houses as well as inventories in archives to get an idea of what the rooms possibly could have looked like. The museum had to buy pieces of furniture as well as gilt leather and other things from antique dealers if not found in the collections. There were lots of criticism from colleagues and journalists both against the creation of the rooms and the way of aquisition. But when the new museum opened, the criticism turned into admiration for how problems had been solved.
During the following years there were a few changes in the rooms but the greater part of the period room suite existed until the beginning of the 1970s. It was a popular part of the museum exhibitions, especially used by study groups in interior design and art history.
Also in other museums in Sweden there were period rooms installed. Kulturen in Lund created a series of rooms nearly at the same time as The Nordiska Museet and so did The Röhsska Museet in Gothenburg in 1916, but only a suite of 18th century rooms. The county museum of Sörmland in Nyköping installed in the 1920s some 18th century interiors, all from castles and manors in the county. Also a few other province museums showed one or two period rooms, mostly from late 18th century.
