“Poor man’s silver” in the National Museum of Slovenia

Abstract

The contribution primarily focuses on investigating the provenance of artisanal objects made of pewter that are kept by the National Museum of Slovenia. It begins by providing a short history of pewter craft, which reached its zenith in Central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most objects under discussion date to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were produced almost exclusively in the Central European area, predominantly in Ljubljana’s pewter workshops. The museum has built its pewter collection for nearly two hundred years of its existence. The process of acquiring new items was affected by both the museum’s pursuit of its objectives to enrich its collections and highly diverse external circumstances.