“Noble Rivalry Between People of Good Will.” How Citizens Created the National Museum in Warsaw

Abstract

The National Museum in Warsaw holds one of the largest and oldest museum collections in Poland. The majority of the collection derives from donations and bequests made by thousands of Poles living in the country and abroad. Benefactors would donate single works of art or their entire collections to the Museum, the latter ones often purposefully amassed to enrich future national collections. Such provenance of collections permits to categorize the Warsaw Museum – according to Krzysztof Pomian’s typology – to the group of euergetic museums. The paper’s objective is to discuss the genesis, range and effects of this noble yet universally forgotten social phenomenon on the basis of multiple surviving archive materials and from a modern-day perspective.