Museum founder at the museum
He is remembered by the Constitution and 1814. A new permanent exhibition will now remind us of Wilhelm Frimann Koren Christie (1778-1849) as the founder of Bergen Museum.
”This exhibition shows a huge distance to the everyday life of people. But he was interested in ordinary people,” says Associate Professor Jakob Ågotnes of the Department of Cultural Studies and Art History at the opening ceremony of the exhibition at the Cultural History Collections on Wednesday.
In the Christie Room we can see several pieces of personal belongings from a prosperous life: an ink pot, binoculars, a mantel clock, a coin collection and a nightcap of linen with white seam and salmon-coloured silk lining. His mother’s spinning wheel and wedding shoes, the camp bed he used when he travelled, a portable medicine chest where the camphorated oil and other medicines from the 1840s is still inside some of the bottles.
National Bergensian
With Wilhelm Christie among the audience – in the portrait in the background – Kari Gaarder Losnedahl proudly presented the new exhibition room. The interior has been arranged by Gaarder Losnedahl together with architect Anne Aspen. There was another Christie in the background, Nicolai Ragnvald, who arrived from the eastern part of the country where most of the descendants of Christie settled down.
“But we are all aware that we come from Bergen,” ensured the living Christie.
It is true that the old Christie was born in Kristiansund. However, after his law examination in Copenhagen and a intermediate job as secretary at the Danish chancery, he headed for Bergen and the position as county court judge in Nordhordland. From that point he was as good a Bergensian as anybody. He was the first representative from Bergen at the Eidsvoll meeting in 1814, he led the negotiations with Sweden, he was President of the Norwegian Storting and he had received most credit for preserving Norway’s independent position within the union with Sweden.
And he was the founder of Bergen Museum.
Nature and culture
The ambitions were great in 1825, the year of foundation. Bergen Museum was planned to be as large as the British Museum. It did not happen this way, but the collection was large enough and the museum was an important basis for the subsequent establishment of the University of Bergen.
In the national awakening that took place in Norway in the 1800s, Christie, a member of the upper class interested in Norwegian folk art, was interested in documenting everything typically Norwegian. Christie and other pioneers were personally involved in collecting and working on objects for the collections. He himself collected stones, plants and animals, put fish and birds in alcohol, and he enthusiastically tried to convince others to learn the art of stuffing birds, as UoB’s Rector, Kirsti Koch Christensen cheerfully mentioned under the opening ceremony.
However, the Christie exhibition does not only contain a fascinating selection of various objects. Gaarder Losnedahl could also present part of the large amount of original documents that the University Library in Bergen has loaned to the Bergen Museum:
“These documents show in its entirety the huge scope of Christies life and work. The political activity, working as a state official and administrator and not the least the great effort to establish and build up Bergen Museum.
The Christie Room is located on the third floor of the Cultural History Collections.