Museum of Decorative Arts

Museum · Old Town (Staré Město) — 17. listopadu, facing the Old Jewish CemeteryPrague,Czechia

A Prague museum of half a million objects around one of the world's great Bohemian glass collections, its trades carved along the facade.

The Museum of Decorative Arts is where Bohemian glass is kept: goblets, engraved and cut and ruby-stained, cased in rows that run from the sixteenth century to modern studio sculpture. It is one of the largest collections of the material anywhere, and it sits inside about half a million objects — furniture, ceramics, posters, photography, textiles. The building names its own subject on the outside: reliefs along the first floor spell out the trades the collection was assembled for, from basketry and lacemaking to armour and bell-founding. The building went up in 1900 to Josef Schulz's design, in a French neo-Renaissance manner, for a museum that had been collecting since 1885. It stands hard against the wall of the old Jewish burial ground, and some of its windows look down into it. The museum's own main hall has been restored and is shown as part of the visit. Beyond the glass, the furniture, poster and photography holdings carry Czech design through the whole of the twentieth century.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start upstairs with the permanent collection — the ground floor is given to temporary exhibitions, and visitors regularly walk one show and leave without seeing the glass at all.
Follow the glass in chronological order — engraved Renaissance goblets, Baroque cut crystal, industrial output and then the studio work of the mid-twentieth century; the whole point is that the line never breaks.
Look at the facade before you go in — the reliefs along the first floor name the crafts the museum was built to serve, so the building announces its own subject to the street.
Find a window that looks over the cemetery wall — the old Jewish burial ground is immediately next door, and from certain rooms you see the stones from above, which is a view you cannot get inside it.
This is applied art, not painting — pictures and sculpture from the nineteenth century onward live in a different museum in this city, and the split is deliberate rather than accidental.

Things to do

1
Walk the glass from goblet to sculpture
Take the glass display in order and do not skip the middle. Engraved Renaissance vessels give way to Baroque cut crystal, then to nineteenth-century factory output, then to the studio pieces of the 1950s and 60s. It is the same trade for six hundred years, and seeing it in sequence is the reason this museum exists.
2
Stand in the museum’s own restored hall
Before the cases, look at the room they stand in. The floor is laid in coloured stone stars, the vault above is painted with pattern, and the arcades run round three sides. The building was designed in the 1890s as a teaching collection, and the hall itself was meant to be the first exhibit a craftsman saw.