Prague’s Princely Collection
July 2008
William Lobkowicz was born in Connecticut, but for centuries his family were princes of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). After the end of Communist rule, Lobkowicz moved to Prague and set about reclaiming his ancestral heritage of art and real estate. Thanks to his efforts, Lobkowicz Palace has been reconstituted as a museum and opened to the public last year.
TELL US ABOUT THE COLLECTION AND HOW IT RELATED TO YOUR FAMILY'S HISTORY.
We call the exhibition at Lobkowicz Palace “the Princely Collections,” because we are princes of the Holy Roman Empire. These collections, dating back over 500 years, are intact and presented in a holistic way. For example, our display of the arms and armor connects back to Vaclav Eusebius, the second Prince Lobkowicz (1609–77), who was a general and head of the Imperial war council in the Thirty Years’ War and did the Baroque renovations to Lobkowicz Palace. In the palace you can see the suit of armor that he wore, his guns, and the rooms that he built. We have the wedding service of Vaclav Eusebius’s parents, dating back to 1555, which is some of the earliest stuff here.
Probably the most remarkable thing about it is that in the 20th century our family lost everything twice and got it back twice. My grandfather Maximilian first lost his possessions when the Nazis came to Prague in 1939. After World War II, his property was returned. Then in 1949 the Communists took over, and he left Prague with just his coat and hat. My grandfather was sympathetic to England, and he became the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Great Britain. My father was 10 years old at the time and was sent to America, where I was born and raised. When the Communists fell from power in the early 1990s, I returned to Prague.
In late 2002 the Czech government made it possible for our family to recover Lobkowicz Palace. I began petitioning for the return of family items in 1991; the last property, Roudnice Castle, where my father lived as a boy, will return to our family at the end of 2008. We have recovered 10 castles and the vast majority of their contents, which were scattered throughout the country.
DO YOU LIVE IN THE PALACE?
I can’t afford to! My wife and I rent a three-bedroom apartment in Prague, where we live with our three children.
WHAT IS THE ART-HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LOBKOWICZ COLLECTION?
Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Haymaking” (shown) is the pinnacle of 16th-century landscape painting and one of the most important paintings in private hands. We also own masterpieces by Veronese and Rubens and by Canaletto, including his greatest and largest views of London and the Thames, which were painted around 1747. They were acquired directly from Canaletto by the sixth Prince during his stay in London and brought back to Bohemia, where they have been ever since. They are considered the very finest of Canaletto’s nine years in London. The Veronese and Rubens came into the family through a marriage by the third Prince Lobkowicz and remain important cornerstones of the roughly 1,500 paintings in the collections.
I first saw Brueghel’s “Haymaking” when my family visited Prague in 1976 when I was 15 years old. I remember that it was a big event for our family to see it on display at Prague’s National Gallery, where we eventually repatriated the painting.
HOW DID YOU TRACE THE REST OF YOUR FAMILY'S PAINTINGS AND POSSESSIONS?
It was difficult. We hired a lawyer and went to the different ministries and regional archives to get information. We sought out employees from my grandfather’s time and their children, and went to churches and talked to priests. The process of restitution was detective work. We had to find a paper trail.
We had personal negotiations and discussions with each individual institution that possessed our items. In some cases we decided to lend objects on a multi-year basis, including to the National Gallery, the Decorative Arts Museum, the National Library and other local and regional museums. We met responsible and honest people, for the most part, but there were a few who we felt were obstructive and unfair. With these people, we had to work much harder to pursue our rights under the law. We were driven by our desire for justice and the chance to make the collections available to the public for the first time in a comprehensive way.