Nieborów Palace

Climb the main staircase at Nieborów and the walls and ceiling around you are covered in blue-and-white Dutch tiles, some 10,000 of them, made in Amsterdam and Utrecht in the early 18th century. The house itself is a Baroque palace built in the 1690s near Łowicz, west of Warsaw, to designs by Tylman van Gameren, the Dutch-born architect who worked across Poland, for Cardinal Michał Radziejowski.

Its character comes from the Radziwiłłs, who acquired it in 1774. Michał Hieronim Radziwiłł, one of the richest magnates of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, filled it with European paintings, prints and books, while his wife Helena laid out Arkadia, a romantic landscape garden a few kilometres away. Much of the collection was later sold off by a grandson at auctions in Paris, yet the house stayed in Radziwiłł hands until 1945.

That year, as the Red Army advanced and manor houses across Poland were being ransacked, Stanisław Lorentz, director of the National Museum in Warsaw, posted a notice declaring Nieborów a branch of the state museum. The house came through intact, and it remains a branch today, with period rooms, a library of about 12,000 volumes and family portraits. In the Voivode's Bedroom hangs a portrait of the couple's daughter Aniela, painted in 1802 by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the French portraitist who had once painted Marie Antoinette.