A gyűjtemény leírása
The fourth largest collection in the Hungarian Department, the Crafts and Trades Collection, is made up of approximately 13,000 artefacts associated with traditional occupations. As a rule, the museum has placed cottage industry shop equipment, sets of tools, and pieces associated with various handicrafts and trade guilds into the Crafts and Trades Collection, leaving actual finished products in various other collections.
The only exceptions to this are the collection's carved wooden items, including distaffs for spinning, shuttles for weaving, and beaters and scrub boards (mangling boards) for washing, all of which may be seen as folk art as well.
Items belonging to the collection's workshops and shop equipment, the richest body of material of its type in the country, may be broken down as follows (with any one craft represented in several places): full workshops, 23 workshops in 19 crafts; nearly complete workshops, comprising 14 workshops in 11 crafts; less complete workshops, 21 workshops in 12 crafts; and special tools and other items covering a total of 9 separate crafts. Crafts and trades represented by more than one set of equipment include, lace making, book binding, spinning/weaving, mézeskalács* and candle making, comb making, and pottery.
Despite all attempts to the contrary, the Crafts and Trades Collection does not cover the full range of small folk crafts pursued in Hungary. Moreover, certain types of objects are clearly overrepresented. Groups of artefacts comprising more than 100 items make up a full half the collection: pastry cutters (1267), stencils for dying traditional Hungarian blue-and-white cloth** (1162), distaffs (1026), comb patterns (978), lace-making bobbins (588), spindles (519), scrub boards (mangling boards) (385), wash beaters (310), spindle rings (156), spinning wheel nails (148), carding combs (130), linen frames (130), and various works of art (102).
In terms of ethnographic research, the parts of the collection that have been most carefully studied are those dealing with spinning, weaving, and woodcarving, the latter of which has been included in numerous folk art exhibitions and photo albums.
The curator of the collection is Péter Szuhay and Gábor Kőszegi.
* Translator's note: mézeskalács is a flat cake, biscuit, or cookie made with honey, similar to lebkuchen or gingerbread and often elaborately decorated with thin line
** Translator's note: in Hungarian this cloth is called kékfestő, or blue-dying. The finished product is an indigo cloth with small white patterns, similar to calico.