Material Worlds : Queen Hedwig Eleonora as Collector and Patron of the arts

Abstract: The thesis portrays the role of Hedwig Eleonora (1636-1715) dowager queen of Sweden, born princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, as a patron and collector. Her role is analysed as to have played a great part in the Swedish cultural political visual production before and during the age of absolutism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century.Hedwig Eleonora’s specific areas of interests have in this study been grouped as metaphorical material worlds: her active involvements in pictures, wonders and knowledge. The analysis concerns Hedwig Eleonora’s patronage strategies of painters, sculptors, ivory sculptors, hardstone carvers, jewellers and goldsmiths, as well as ideas on natural resources, rarities and scholarship, which were of great significance to the visual display and political culture created around the Swedish royal court. Furthermore, the study of her collections brings to light the influence of her international connections, including agents of exclusive commodities and scholars, as well as the great importance of her continental family network, such as the influential and prominent courts of Gottorf and Dresden, whose patronage patterns are mirrored in the symbolic environments created by Hedwig Eleonora.