Fabric Collection

FaThe collection of historic fabrics was formally created only in 1978, although the first textiles: tapestries and carpets, were purchased in 1961, shortly after the establishment of the Castle Museum in Malbork, with a view to furnishing empty castle chambers. These first acquisitions marked a practical direction for the development of the future collection, oriented on large-format fabrics, carpets and tapestries, which were later joined by contoured stripes – an element of Polish national costume in the 18th century – as an exemplum referring to the “Polish times” at the castle. Currently, the collection contains 75 items, so it is rather modest in number, but it boasts many valuable examples and sets of fabrics, the date of which dates back to the 17th and 18th – and even the 16th centuries. Among the 16th-17th-century Flemish tapestries, two biblical tapestries are worth mentioning: Jakub with his family on his way to Canaan from the Oudenaarde weaving center and Samson’s Wedding from the Wauters family workshop in Antwerp. The core of the collection is a valuable set of 14 kontusz sashes woven among others in persian houses in Słuck, Kobyłka, Lipków, Korets, also in French Lyon manufactories. It is worth adding that most of them come from the collection of the well-known Warsaw collector, Januariusz Gościmski. Few in the collection, but representative in their category, are the seventeenth-century saddle pads embroidered with gold and silver thread, and tapestries from the Buczacz factory of Oskar and Artur Potocki, associated with the times of historical splendor of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.