National Museum of Denmark

The palace facade by the entrance recalls the time when the building was constructed for the heir to the throne. The royal family soon chose another residence, and the rooms had time to serve as offices for officials and spaces for artists, scholarly societies and the Supreme Court of Denmark. Now Danish antiquities, the classical collection, coins and medals stand side by side under this roof. The ethnographic collection still keeps vessels, ornaments and ritual objects collected to tell the story of the everyday lives of people far from Denmark.

In eighteen forty-five, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen secured several rooms for himself in this palace. Thomsen was a museum curator without a university degree, and he wanted to move here collections scattered across different buildings in Copenhagen.

The palace was built in seventeen forty-three to seventeen forty-four for Crown Prince Frederick, the future King Frederick the Fifth. However, the royal family soon moved away, and the rooms were occupied by court officials, artists, scholarly societies and, after the fire at Christiansborg Palace, even the Supreme Court of Denmark. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the former residence had room for a museum.

Thomsen's appointment once provoked resistance: the son of a merchant, who was neither a historian nor an archaeologist, had been made curator of antiquities. The position was unpaid. For the first twenty-two years, he supported himself with family funds and continued sorting through a collection that mockers said the entire museum would fit into a single box.

After receiving rooms here, Thomsen conceived a separate museum of the cultures of the world. He sent requests to Danish sailors, diplomats, settlers and expedition members. Rather than curiosities for a royal cabinet, he needed ordinary things: tools, tableware, clothing, ornaments and ritual objects. In the Danish trading colony of Tranquebar in southern India, officials collected such things on his direct instructions. Thomsen arranged the acquisitions by geographical regions, so that objects people used in everyday life would be placed together.

In eighteen forty-nine, the Royal Ethnographic Museum opened in these palace rooms—one of the first in the world. Thomsen continued writing to his assistants abroad and seeking money for purchases. Under him, the collection grew from about one thousand five hundred objects to nearly ten thousand.

Then the classical collection, Danish antiquities, coins and medals were moved here. In eighteen ninety-two, the collections under one roof were given a common name—the National Museum of Denmark.

From eighteen fifty-one, Thomsen lived in an apartment inside the palace, and he died here in eighteen sixty-five. The present ethnographic collection still keeps the tools, vessels, ornaments and ritual objects brought to Copenhagen in response to his letters.