About the museum:
Marton Museum is the first private museum in Croatia; it was founded in 2003 by Veljko Marton to enable public access to his own collection of artworks. Currently on show in the museum are more than a thousand exhibits of applied art and works of art created in western and central Europe and Russia between 1750 and 1850. The furniture collection consists of a hundred exhibits made in the period between the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century. These objects tell not only of stylistic trends in the making of furniture, but also of the lifestyles of the wealthier middle classes and gentry and their keeping up with the fashions in interior decoration in Europe. The silver exhibits of the Marton Collection on the whole come from Biedermeier, during which this precious metal is more often to be found in wealthier bourgeois homes, no longer representing the privileged reserve of the aristocracy. The glass collection in terms of quantity and quality is one of the most important segments of the collection as a whole. More than three hundred exhibits are on show in the collection, deriving from 18th and 19th century works in Bohemia, Austria, Russia, France and Croatia. The timepiece collection is not large, but is an important part of the collection. Most of the timepieces were produced between 1810 and 1840, which is characterised by the transition from the pomp of the Empire style to the unpretentious and attractive bourgeois Biedermeier. The Marton Collection also includes paintings of the best Austrian painters of the first half of the 19th century, such as Eduard Ender, Mathias Johann Ranftl, Carl Schäffer, Joseph Kriehuber and Franz Richter and important Croatian painters like Michael Stroy, Franjo Pfalz and Hugo Conrad von Hötzendorf. There is also a collection of porcelain, including valuable collections from Russia and Vienna, while the Sèvres china collection is the pride of the whole museum. French and Russian works of art are something of a rarity in a small central European country, which makes their importance still the greater.
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