Lobkowicz Palace

Museum · Prague Castle (Hradčany)Prague,Czechia

One family's collection hung back in their own rooms inside Prague Castle, confiscated twice in a century and returned twice.

The Lobkowicz Palace is one family's collection, hung in the family's own rooms inside Prague Castle. Four centuries of a single household are on the walls: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Haymaking, two views of London that Canaletto painted on commission here, orchestral parts marked in Beethoven's hand, and Mozart's re-scoring of Handel's Messiah. Between them hang relatives, sporting guns, dogs and dinner services, because this was a house before it was a museum. What is unusual here is who is showing it to you. The collections were seized twice in one century and came back twice, the second time after 1989. The palace itself was handed back in 2002, and the family opened it as their own museum in 2007. None of that is smoothed over on the labels, so the losses are part of what you read as you go. It changes how the rooms feel. You are not walking a national collection assembled by a state; you are walking one household's things, put back on the walls of the house they were taken from, by the people they were taken from.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The Castle ticket does not cover this door — the palace stands inside the gates but is privately run and sells its own admission, which is the single commonest mistake made at this end of Jiřská.
It is the quietest interior on the hill — The cathedral and the Old Royal Palace move people through in a queue; these rooms are often empty, so you can linger.
Look for pencil, not print, on the scores — The manuscript room's value is the corrections and cues composers wrote on the parts themselves, legible if you get close to the case.

Things to do

1
Stand in front of the Bruegel until the work reads
Find Haymaking and stay with it. It is a working landscape, not a scene: scythes being carried, a cart loading, figures on a path that runs out of the picture. Four of its five surviving companions are in Vienna and New York, so this is the whole of the cycle available anywhere between them.
2
Walk the family rooms as an inventory
Go through the portrait and object rooms without hunting for masterpieces. Guns, porcelain, dog paintings and generations of faces are hung as a household accumulated them. It is the clearest picture in Prague of what an aristocratic collection actually looked like before the state or a museum ever sorted it.