NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I’ m in Dresden, Berlin, and Amsterdam for an art-writing trip and, while in Dresden, to experience Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Since Prague is only a two-hour train trip from Dresden, we went for a day. I’d never been. The city wasn’t bombed during the Second World War, so splendid architecture from Gothic to Renaissance to Baroque and to Rococo exists, often cheek by jowl, and all showing a unique Bohemian flair. I was there less for the eclectic cityscape and mostly for the Lobkowicz Palace. It’s on top of Prague Castle, the hill that commands the city heights and overlooks its old spires, bridges, and old red-tile roofs.
The Lobkowicz Palace, a late-16th-century complex, is the only privately owned part of Prague Castle. The rest is owned by the Czech government and includes the Czech president’s office.
The Lobkowicz family owns what’s purported to be the finest Old Master art collection in central Europe, castles and estates, a splendid music-history archive, antique guns and armor, and every other precious thing families with a thousand-year pedigree acquire along the way.
Its iconic, truly famous painting is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Haymaking, from 1565, one of the series of six seasonal landscapes. Aside from the Bruegel, though, I’d call the collection fabled but much unknown. First of all, it’s a family collection in a part of the world — Moravia and Bohemia — that’s not on a touristical or even academic trail. Second, like Moravia, Bohemia, and so many other places in that neighborhood, the collection has had a turbulent hundred years or so. The Nazis stole the art from the family in 1942 when they ruled what was then Czechoslovakia. The country’s first post-war government returned it in 1946. Its first communist regime seized it again in 1948 and redistributed bundles of it.
In an extraordinary case of restitution starting in 1991, the Lobkowicz heirs, one in particular living in America, got the kit and caboodle back as a new Czech order undid 40 years of Iron Curtain theft. In 2007, the Lobkowicz Palace opened as a proper art-and-history museum. I wanted to see what the family was doing.
It’s an immersive, captivating experience that starts with a climb up a steep hill. There’s a way to drive to the top of Prague Castle, but “wir bis zu Spitze der Hugels gehen . . . Lobkowicz Palace . . . bitte” to our Uber driver went unheeded, despite my helpful, supportive sign language. English isn’t widely spoken and, evidently, my rustic German not easily understood. To the bottom of the hill we were dropped. It’s a hike, but it didn’t kill me and pumped blood in my head. I felt physically engaged.
The museum’s well done and achieves the family’s primary goals. The palace displays to the public a selection from the Lobkowicz vast and various collection. In that respect, it’s a survey museum with some depth. It owns about 1,500 paintings but shows only about 100, many of them old family portraits. There’s a nice ceramics gallery, spaces dedicated to the music archive and the engagement of generations of Lobkowicz princes in music, a gallery on hunting and arms, a gallery devoted to Haymaking, and another to two giant, spellbinding views of London by Canaletto.
These galleries compose the entire second story of the palace. The first story is an atmospheric and events space with some focused art spaces. There are galleries devoted to Piranesi prints, paintings of birds, dog pictures, and chinoiserie wall decoration. Some have impressive views of Prague. And a concert hall hosts music performances. These aren’t period rooms. Rather, they evoke the spaces in which the family lived.
The palace also has a welcoming, efficient reception space, a nice restaurant and gift shop, and an effective website. Visitors get a quality experience.
All of this impressed me. The restitution effort, insofar as the Lobkowicz family was concerned, started in 1991. The art — tens of thousands of objects, documents, and books — had to be located after the communist dispersal and reconstituted as well as properly catalogued. A proper public museum needed to be conceived, established, financed, and professionally staffed from scratch. All of this occurred in a very short period of time. Happening simultaneously was the restitution of land and buildings.
“Happening simultaneously” doesn’t mean “happening automatically.” The branch of the Lobkowicz family that now owns the art collection, the library, the archives, the palace, Nelahozeves Castle, Roudnice Castle, Jerezi Castle, and thousands of acres of land is actually from Dover, a suburb of Boston.
Maximilian Lobkowicz, the politically active, anti-Nazi son of the last Lobkowicz prince, sent his son, Martin, to America during the Second World War while he served in London in the Czech government-in-exile. He lived near Boston under the guardianship of Sylvia Warren, a dog breeder and equestrienne who was totally deaf. Martin (1928–2014) went to Milton Academy and then Harvard, served in the Korean War, married a woman from Kentucky, became a stockbroker, and had four very American children.
When communism went out of business, the family agreed to send Martin’s son, William, and William’s wife, Alexandra, to Prague to assess the outlook for restitution. William (b. 1961) was a Harvard graduate working in the Boston real-estate business. Alexandra (b. 1963) is also American and also from a refugee aristocratic background. She was a teacher in Boston when they met. Though Czechoslovakia abolished aristocratic privileges in its 1918 constitution, both are, technically, a prince and princess. Not even the Boston real-estate business, fierce and ratty, could have prepared William for his future.
The couple essentially became the entrepreneurs for a family restitution start-up for which there was no precedent. The Lobkowicz family had to prove — deed by deed, sometimes over centuries and through shifting borders and imperial dynasties — what they owned before the communist and Nazi confiscations. When they finally got clear title, the properties weren’t exactly turnkey-ready. Jerezi Castle had been a secret police prison. Roudnice was a military music school. Communists are tacky, and during the Iron Curtain era, money for maintenance was tight.
SOS Home Depot. This little family based in Boston and Dover accomplished so much that I consider extraordinary. I never thought I would count a Czech prince and princess among the people in the arts I admire the most. William’s and Alexandra’s son, also William (b. 1994), is now a big part of the family enterprise and was raised in Prague as his parents led the restitution charge.
I would suggest a few things. The first gallery consists mostly of full-length family portraits starting from the 16th century, when Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague, making the city a world center and enriching it commercially and culturally. There’s a Lobkowicz genealogy, too. Some of the portraits are clunkers. It makes more sense curatorially to display the best ones in the context of the best stories, either about politics, personalities, or for the quality of the portrait.
The first prince, Zdenko Adalbert, has a portrait, as does the first princess, Polyxena Pernštejn. Both are good as works of art, and each has a good story. He was Rudolf’s chancellor, or right-hand man, over all things Czech. She was from a prominent Roman Catholic noble family with close ties to the Spanish Hapsburgs. More famously, though, she nursed back to health the two Holy Roman Empire envoys who had survived being hurled from a window in Prague Castle during a testy meeting with Protestant locals. The Defenestration of Prague in 1618 is a sobering moment for arrogant bureaucrats from far away and naughty children to contemplate.
There’s a portrait of Margarita Teresa of Spain, the daughter of Spain’s Philip IV and his second wife and niece. . . . Yes, I said niece. It’s attributed to Velázquez and is from the mid 1650s. I don’t think it’s by Velázquez, though it’s a lovely portrait done while Margarita was a toddler and before her chin grew Hapsburg-long. She married her uncle, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, and was close to the second prince. The gallery needs more context to fortify the links among the Lobkowicz princes, the early clash between new Protestant elites and the old Roman Catholic order, and the Thirty Years’ War. These clashes and the war find the Lobkowicz clan in a pivotal spot consolidating their wealth and power.
The wall color in these two spaces is white, which makes the pictures look like black holes. I’d find a deep red. The labels need to be enriched. Most of them recite only the names of the sitters, with a dry sentence or two.
The ceramics gallery is great. It focuses on Bohemian craftsmen, especially Anabaptist potters expelled from Bohemia at the start of the Thirty Years’ War for religious extremism but eventually allowed to return. There’s also a selection from the magnificent Delft service, from the Metal Pot pottery, commissioned around 1685 by a Lobkowicz count. It’s the biggest surviving Delft service from the time’s best manufacturer.
I also loved the firearms gallery for its beautiful installation and exceptional engraving and inlay.
The most modern-looking galleries examine the family’s 400-year-old promotion of what we now call classical music. To them, it was imperial dance music, new instruments, and support for contemporary composers, including Beethoven. Some princes, such as the sixth prince, Ferdinand Philipp, were gifted performers. He played the cello, the violin, and the idiosyncratic glass harmonica. The third and fourth princes were master lutenists. Others collected original scores, creating Europe’s best privately owned music archive. The seventh prince, Josef Frantisek Maximilian, supported Beethoven while both lived in Vienna.
By “most modern-looking,” I mean high production values, meaty labels, a mix of archives and instruments, and saturated wall colors. The label font is, alas, too small and too dense to make for easy reading, though the text is engaging. The music galleries seem tiny, given what’s in them. The objects need room to breathe. They seemed claustrophobic, which is the last thing court music should evoke. This gallery was redone recently. It’s fine, and I’m a critic, but for the next round of gallery overhauls, I’d follow my “less is more” rule.
Over time, I’d suggest unifying the look of the portrait, ceramics, arms and armor, and music galleries. The portrait and ceramics spaces seem to have an entirely different curatorial touch from the other galleries, so much so that they seem to be in different museums.
I liked the Haymaking gallery. Bruegel’s painting glows. It was probably conserved before it went to the Bruegel retrospective in Vienna, which I reviewed in 2018. It’s a landscape, a scene of everyday life, and a religious picture. Good graphics and a video kiosk smartly guide the visitor without detracting him from the art.
I didn’t get to Nelahozeves Castle, which is about 20 miles from Prague and the home of the 65,000-volume rare-book library, the Old Master works-on-paper collection, and more paintings. The Lobkowicz family probably wants to make the castle a tourist destination. It’s one of the best Renaissance buildings in the Czech Republic. Visitors want to see lots of different things, but paintings reign supreme for many. With the Bruegel and the Canalettos in Prague, good things have to be reserved for Nelahozeves. Veronese’s David with the Head of Goliath and Rubens’s Hygieia Nourishing the Sacred Serpent are there.
I read the Lobkowicz Collections’ last few annual reports. I can’t overstate what the family has accomplished. They’ve established a beautiful museum, good research, exhibition and conservation programs, an impressive fundraising operation, and elegant events spaces. They’ve established a program to digitize the music archive, called, appropriately, BACH. The family didn’t get back the palace on top of Prague Castle until 2003, which makes these results even more amazing. As a museum and welcoming place for the public, the palace presents itself better than lots of American museums.
The family has shown staying power as well as ingenuity and grit that are, I’d like to think, distinctly American.
Prague was barely bombed during the Second World War, preserving an entrancing mix of old architectural styles. I spent lots of time at the Lobkowicz Palace, since that was my mission, but everything else was for atmosphere. I know very little about German Gothic architecture, but the Powder Tower, the oldest astrological clock, and the Old Town Hall are hale and hearty with heavy stone surface ornament leavened by colorful heraldic plaques. Mixed among them are small houses and factories from the 1600s and 1700s. It’s very pretty.