COLLECTIONS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN PORCELAIN IN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS IN UKRAINE: GAINS AND LOSSES

Abstract

The study of Western European porcelain is largely based on museum and private collections of products from manufactories in different countries. In Ukraine, collections of foreign porcelain were created in many museums in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Poltava, and Vinnytsia. Each of them had its own circumstances of creation and preservation. However, connections between museums formed the practice of exchanging works, including porcelain.In view of the above, the purpose of the article is to systematically trace the existence of collections of Western European porcelain in leading Ukrainian museums, to analyse the most important stages of their creation, and the current state of scientific research of individual samples and groups of works. Such an approach will create an opportunity to form a common corpus of images of porcelain works with relevant data on their origin and will reveal the existing gaps in the study of collection works.As a result of the analysis carried out in the article, it was found that the initial stage of the formation of most museum porcelain collections in Ukraine was the nationalisation of private collections. The 1930s–1950s were the next stage in the development of national museums, characterised by the practice of exchanging porcelain works, which led to a certain dispersion of the initial composition of collections, and a breakdown of ties between the objects of a particular service.At the present stage, many museums have a positive trend of special scientific study of Western European porcelain samples and the creation of digital catalogues. However, this process is at the initial stage of its development, requiring the development of unified approaches to certification and attribution based on modern methods.