The story
In the king's private rooms at Hohenzollern Castle, above the passage to the bedroom, hangs a portrait painted in 1802 by the French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The sitter is Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia, who died in 1810 at the age of 34. The rooms were kept for her son Wilhelm I, later the first German emperor, who hung a likeness of his mother in every study and bedroom he used.
The castle around that room was built by another of her sons. Two earlier fortresses had stood on this isolated peak of the Swabian Jura, the ancestral seat of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the first was destroyed in a siege in 1423. Her eldest son, King Frederick William IV of Prussia, had the present neo-Gothic castle built between 1850 and 1867 to designs by Friedrich August Stüler, a pupil of the Berlin architect Schinkel.
The castle still belongs to the Hohenzollern family and is shown as a museum. Its treasury holds the Prussian royal crown made for Wilhelm II in 1889, along with personal belongings of Frederick the Great, among them his snuffboxes. From 1952 until 1991 the coffins of Frederick the Great and his father also rested here, before they went back to Potsdam.
