From the museum website, 20 August 2011
Opening the new period of its own activity, the Art Museum Rīgas Birža offers to the devotees of art and to the general public a unique exhibition of porcelain. This exhibition, made jointly by the Groninger Museum in Groningen and the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden, both situated in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, will focus mainly on interactions in the field of ceramics during the 17th century. It will highlight the variety of Chinese and Japanese porcelain that flooded the Dutch market and explain how it influenced material culture in Holland as well as in other European countries. It will demonstrate the sudden emergence of the Delftware industry as a reaction to porcelain shortages, and how this ‘Blue Delft’ became so famous.
The exhibition, featuring about 130 of the best pieces from both museum collections, will show how the shapes and decorations of Oriental porcelain and Dutch Delftware influenced each other. In a broader sense, it will illustrate an important aspect of the worldwide globalisation of trade and culture in the 17th century in which the Netherlands played a central role and acted as the meeting place of East and West.
Curator of this project and the author of catalogue is the famous researcher of Oriental Porcelain and author of many monographs for this theme Dr. Christiaan J.A. Jörg, Professor Emeritus of Leiden University in Netherlands and former curator of Groninger Museum in Groningen. The exhibition and a publication of the catalogue occur in cooperation with the Embassy of Kingdom of the Netherlands in Latvia.
The exhibition and a publication of the catalogue occurs in cooperation with the Embassy of Kingdom of the Netherlands in Latvia and are made financially possible by Vitol B.V., Hendrik Műller Fond, Kingdom of the Netherlands and Nordconnect/SNN.