The story
On the first floor of Oldenburg Castle there is a small room hung with 44 paintings by one man. Wilhelm Tischbein, the German painter best known for his portrait of Goethe resting in the Roman countryside, served the Oldenburg court from 1808, and in 1819 and 1820 he painted this cycle of Idylls for the castle of Duke Peter Friedrich Ludwig. Goethe himself published verses and prose commentaries on the series in 1822.
The castle grew from a medieval fortress into the residence of Oldenburg's counts, dukes and grand dukes, and it has housed the state museum since 1923. Its staterooms keep the look of the grand-ducal court, and the cultural-history rooms run from medieval manuscripts and carved ivory to Art Nouveau interiors and Bauhaus design.
Two more buildings nearby belong to the museum. The Augusteum, built in 1865 to 1867 in an Italian Renaissance style as the city's first art gallery, holds the Old Masters: Italian, Dutch and French painting from the 15th to the 18th century. The Prinzenpalais, a classicist palace of the 1820s, shows German art of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Impressionists Liebermann and Corinth to the Brücke painters Heckel, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff, and a large group of works by Franz Radziwill, who lived and painted on the nearby coast at Dangast.
