Friday, February 8, 2013

European Portrait Miniatures - Conference in Celle



The Fifth Exhibition of the Tansey Collection was opened on 25th
January 2013 in Celle, Germany at the wonderful Bomann Museum. 




Bomann Museum






At the
same time, an International Conference was held at the nearby Celle
Castle Residence Museum, open to all, free of charge, through the
generosity of Mrs. and Mrs. Tansey. 




Celle Castle


The couple live in Celle, Mrs.
Tansey's home town, although her husband is American.  They have been
collecting miniatures for over 30 years.  In 1997 they created a
Foundation to preserve their collection and make it available for
anyone to see, either physically at the Bomann Museum or online in
English at www.miniaturen-tansey.de/en.





Mr And Mrs Tansey (on the left) attending the conference


Celle is an ancient town in Lower Saxony, filled with timber framed
houses and dominated by the grand Celle Castle.  It has a population
of about 71,000.  The romantic setting of the castle, almost
surrounded by water, was frozen and children were skating on the ice.





With freezing temperatures of -11C and below in Celle itself, Europe
was gripped in an icy hand and participants swapped horror stories of
delayed travel, with one of the speakers stuck for two hours on the
runway, whilst the wings of the aeroplane were de-iced manually by a
man with a scraper on the equivalent of a hydraulic stepladder!  He
arrived in the early hours of the morning.

The Conference was packed with miniature enthusiasts, curators,
conservators, art historians and other specialists and the atmosphere
was very exciting, as participants were able to hear presentations
from some of the most knowledgeable experts in the world and see
images of collections not readily available to the public.  It was
also an occasion to meet and talk to others with a shared interest in
miniatures during the many opportunities during the two days of the
Conference.  The event was brilliantly organized by the well known art
historian/conservator/author Bernd Pappe, Juliane Schmieglitz-Otten,
Head of the Residence Museum at Celle Caste, and Dr. Gerrit Walczak,
Art Historian, Berlin.  Bernd and Juliane wrote the beautiful
catalogue 'Miniatures from the Time of Marie Antoinette in the Tansey
Collection' to accompany the Fifth Exhibition,  which helpfully
includes an English translation.
This book can be ordered online from the Tansey website or from Amazon
and is also available from large bookstores.







The papers from the Conference will be published later this year and
will be available to purchase.