Mikkel Museum

This guide to the Mikkel Museum in Tallinn opens with a porcelain joke aimed at royalty: Meissen's Monkey Orchestra, dressed-up monkey musicians the sculptor Johann Joachim Kandler modeled around the mid-1700s to poke fun at stiff court concerts. It follows the pieces alongside foo dogs and Chinese blue-and-white ware, all part of the six hundred objects antique-shop manager Johannes Mikkel spent his life collecting after the Second World War before handing them to the Art Museum of Estonia in 1994. This room itself has an older job: it went up in 1754 as the working kitchen for Kadriorg Palace, feeding a tsar's household long before any porcelain arrived.