Glow and shine

"Glow and shine" shows the civic home around 1900 with magnificent pieces of carpet art, furniture, crockery and textiles. The highlight is the tapestry "Rosenhaven" by Frida Hansen.

The new assembly (2001-) shows Drammens Museum's collections of furnishings, interiors, decorations and textiles from the time of historicism in the second half of the 1800s. The things from this time are made following the international "new styles", neo-renaissance, neo-rococo, neo-gothic. Such things were long unwanted in Norwegian museums, and stood as an expression of bad taste ("palms and plush").

The richness of variety in the 1800s was an expression of the new modern world's admiration for everything exotic, in the Far East and in our past. Railway and telegraph broke the distances. A new collective bourgeois culture cultivated all that was exotic, but shaped it so that it fit in with their time and was adapted to their cultural conventions. Here we recognize much of our own time's attitudes to things and what we can read into them. The exhibition shows spatial paintings, where the individual objects will work together to convey some of their original moods and attitudes.

Exhibition design: Reidun Bull-Hansen