Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 18. (Budapest, 1999)

Maria FERENCZY: The formation of the Hopp-collection. On the 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts

MARIA FERENCZY THE FORMATION OF THE HOPP COLLECTION* ON THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE FERENC HOPP MUSEUM OF EASTERN ASIATIC ARTS The name of Ferenc Hopp (1833-1919), wealthy optician, patron of the arts, globetrotter and art collector, has become known far and wide through the Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts in Budapest, established by the terms of his will in 1919 and kept up ever since. His career, remarkable in the present age, was not particularly unusual in the rapidly modernising Hungary of the 19th century. He came from a large family in the small town of Fulnek in Moravia to Pest in 1845 to become an optician's apprentice. In 1864 he became the owner of the firm Calderoni and Co., a firm dealing in optical goods. This firm belonged among Hungary's leading optical firms for several decades; the introduction of the school equipment manufacturing and visual teaching aids into Hungary was due to this company/ Ferenc Hopp in his will (in 1919) bequeathed to the state his villa, its garden and his collection of more than four thousand Oriental art objects in order to form a museum. His legacy also contained other values and curiosities, yet the oriental art collection was the richest and the most valuable. This paper tries to explain how this collection came into being, and how Ferenc Hopp the optician and merchant became a well-known art collector. With regard to the origins it is primarily the remaining items of Ferenc Hopp's correspondence that serve as source material. Other sources to the best of my knowledge date from the end of the 1880s only. The first authentic report about pieces in the Hopp collection being exhibited dates from 1889. From the 1890s onwards there are other documents too - photographs, descriptions by visitors, stray documents on the purchase of certain pieces etc.; the first partial list of these objets d'art (the list of more than two hundred pieces exhibited at the exhibition of amateur collectors) dates from 1907, and their first scholarly evaluation - by Zoltán Felvinczi Takács - from 1914/ I have relied on the recollections and researches of Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (in manuscript) as well as on the work by Marianne Felvinczi Takács. By the 1880s, the firm Calderoni & Co. had become stable and prosperous on account of its varied business activities and state orders, with the result that its owner Ferenc Hopp made a great fortune. His assets were further augmented through property transactions, thus enabling him to spend more and more money and time broadening his knowledge of geography and geology, to travel, and then to collect a variety of curious and valuable things. Initially his travels like his earlier journeyman's wanderings^ served mainly professional aims. He regularly visited the The research and this paper is part of a research program - registered on number T 025 755 by OTKA [National Found for Scientific Researches] - entitled Collecting Oriental Art in Hungary as reflected in the Collections of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Art, Budapest.