National Gallery Prague

The National Gallery in Prague traces back to 1796, when a group of Czech aristocrats and citizens, worried that good pictures were leaving the country, founded a society to keep art in Bohemia and show it to the public. That makes it one of the older public collections in Europe.

Today it is spread across several buildings in the city. Medieval Bohemian altarpieces hang in a former convent, the Convent of Saint Agnes, while modern art fills the Trade Fair Palace, a huge functionalist building of 1928 that was among the first of its kind in Europe. There you find French art the gallery bought early, including work by Picasso from his Cubist years, alongside Klimt's shimmering The Virgin and the Czech Cubists who took Picasso's lessons into furniture and buildings.