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The Ethnographical Collection |
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The Ethnographical Collection |
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Peoples of the World |
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The exhibition 'Peoples of the World' is an introductory exhibition, which provides a journey around the globe. It features rare religious artefacts from America before Colombus, the world´s oldest painting by South American Indians, prairie Indian costumes, African sculpture and jewellery, luxury objects from the court of the Turkish Sultan, Indian temple sculptures, Javanese shadow-play figures, handicrafts from China and Japan, paintings and figures depicting the life and teachings of Buddha, and much, much more.
The oldest objects in the collection stem from 'The Indian Chamber', which formed part of the the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities from around 1650 and included objects from China, East India and other remote places. The collection expanded rapidly in the 19th century as objects were brought home from expeditions and from Danish colonial possessions around the world. The ethnographic collection contains objects both from cultures and societies that still exist and from those that are now gone. |
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Tarairiu woman |
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| The Dutch Renaissance artist Albert Eckhout´s famous painting of a woman cannibal carrying human meat in her basket is one of nine paintings of 17th-century Brazillian natives featured in the exhibition. Eckhout painted a total of 26 unique pictures featuring motifs from the Tropics for a German count, who later made a present of them to King Frederik the 3rd, who in turn made them part of his Cabinet of Curiosities. Eckhouts paintings epitomise the European view af 'savages' but also serve as a peephole back to a time when the now extinct Tarairiu still lived in Brazil. |
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Child´s anorak with amulets |
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| The Danish Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen bought this fur from the Netsilik Eskimos in Canada in 1923. It is made of reindeer hide and belonged to six-year-old Tertaaq, whose mother had sewn 80 amulets on it to protect and strengthen her son. The hair from an old man's tempie was meant to bring the boy a long life, the raven skin under the chin would bring him unseen within shooting distance of a reindeer, and the foot of a herring gull and the teeth of a fox brought good luck in hunting. Other amulets were for strength, stamina and luck. |
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Nodding dolls from China |
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| Two figures from 18th-century China depict a government official and his wife, who is wearing a white heron emblem on her coat, denoting that her husband is a sixth- or seventh-grade government official. The woman is not chinese, but Manchurian - the people who ruled China between 1644 and 1911. This is deduced from her hairstyle and her normal feet, which are not bound as Chinese women's feet were at the time. |
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