Memories of things – Alfthan Juel's gifts to the museum

In 1937, the museum received an extensive testamentary gift. Drammenseren Alfthan Juel (1857-1937) listed the Drammens Museum as his universal heir, and the museum inherited NOK 300,000 (equivalent to approx. 12.5 million today). The museum also inherited his rich collection, approx. 1,300 items in addition to archive material, historical documents and books. This gift constituted a significant supplement to the museum's collections, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Juel was the museum's major benefactor from the start. He was a lawyer by profession, but there is no doubt that he had an enormous passion for Drammen's history, museum work and genealogical research.

Juel's collection has its strength in the diversity and complexity of types of objects. Furniture, glass, porcelain, silver, name cloths, memory books, silhouettes, illustrations and examples of Drammen's bourgeois life. The collection is primarily linked to Juel's personality and his interest in genealogy and local history.

In the exhibition, we will show a wide range from Alfthan Juel's complex collection.

By giving a broad presentation of the diversity of Alfthan Juel's gift to the museum, the public will encounter a new and different way of seeing objects from the museum's collections; not inserted into a timeline or selected on the basis of classification, but where a person's passion, gaze and museum passion are the starting point for the objects' composition and presentation.

Large parts of Juel's collection were shown in 1938, since then the collection has never been shown in its entirety. Thus, it is a major event when the public will now, for the first time in nearly 90 years, be able to make acquaintances with the museum's great benefactor and gain an insight into how parts of the museum's collections were built up in their time.

Welcome.