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A salon was a space furnished in aristocratic houses and larger burgher flats to receive visitors. The term salon began to be used in the middle of the 17th century in France to refer to reception and representative rooms in castles. Around the middle of the 18th century, smaller rooms of this type were also used in aristocratic residences. A century later, it could be found in burgher dwellings. Due to their purpose, the salons were lavishly furnished. Their goal was to represent the owners of the house or apartment. The dominant part of this exhibition is a set of seating furniture.
The entrance room, furnished as a salon, is dedicated to the memory of Kežmarok noble, Hedwiga Maria Szirmay (1895, Nyíregyháza – 1973, Kežmarok). Some of the exhibits come from her legacy.
Her life was also marked by turning points in historical events. Raised in aristocratic education, she spent her childhood, in Budapest, Vienna, Kežmarok and Slovenská Ves. She lived as an independent woman, engaged in her favourite hobbies , namely traveling, reading literature and visiting cinemas. However, she was quite taken by fine arts to which she dedicated her whole life. She married Baron Stipsicz, but left him immediately after the marriage. Hedwiga went through the most difficult years during World War II and in the period after it; these years were marked by fear of displacement, loss of property and forced labor. Despite everything, she eventually inherited a richly furnished house on the Main Square No. 46 in Kežmarok, where she lived surrounded by relics of historic home furnishings and rare works of art. She spent her time by traveling abroad or visiting her relatives and friends. She died childless so part of her estate of historical and artistic value has become a part of Museum in Kežmarok collections.
Exhibited salon furniture, in the style of Louis XVI. (around 1775), comes from France. High quality furniture represents lifestyle of the high court nobility. It is made of gilded beech wood and upholstered with tapestry. Various pets images are woven in the seating area and the backrests are decorated with various pastoral scenes, popular in the Rococo period. Above the sofa there is a portrait of Baroness Hedviga's mother, Eleonora née Badányi, painted in Vienna according to her photograph (around 1895). Under the sofa there is an Art Nouveau rug with a poppy flower motif (around 1900).
On the oval table placed between the windows there is a unique Classicist clock by master Michal Topscher from Levoča (around 1785), made of gilded linden wood, with mythological figures. The figure in the middle with a scythe represents the ancient god of time, Chronos. Scythe expresses that time takes nothing and no one into account, everything dies and is destroyed over time.
The round Neo-Rococo table from the 1850s, under the exposed masonry column top, represents a tea-type table, richly decorated with an inlay resembling various flowers. The bronze Rococo sculpture with mythological figures of Satyr and Nymph is the work of the famous French sculptor, Michel de Clodion (before 1760). He described a similar statue in his most famous work – The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
Above the chest of drawers there are miniatures from 1770 to 1815, some of them painted on ivory. In the middle there is a double portrait of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, Maria Antoinette, set in a frame decorated with ivory and tortoiseshell. On the right there is a small painting - a portrait of Hedviga Maria Szirmay from the 1930s.
Her portrait photographs are on the chest of drawers, as well as on the opposite Biedermeier refreshment bar. Other photos display her Kežmarok house on the Main Square no. 46 from the exterior. You can see how it was furnished during her life. Many of the objects in the photographs are exhibited in various places of this room, as well as at Kežmarok Castle. In the painted picture there is a neighboring house, which stood above. In the interwar period, it was replaced by a new building. The Classicist sideboard in the corner of the room, originally bricked into the wall, dates back to the end of the 18th century. Inside there are samples of a lunch set from a London earthenware manufactory from the middle of the 19th century, decorated with romantic and English landscapes with ruins.
