The story
A few paces from the gates of Prague Castle, a passage off Hradčany Square leads into the courtyard of a Baroque palace that Count Václav Vojtěch of Šternberk began building just before 1700. Historians still argue over who designed it. The names usually put forward are three architects then working in Prague, Giovanni Battista Alliprandi, Domenico Martinelli and Jan Santini Aichel.
Pictures came here early. From 1811 to 1871 the palace was the seat of the Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts, a circle of Bohemian nobles who wanted Prague to have a public picture gallery of its own. Their collection grew into today's National Gallery Prague, and after a renovation in 1946 and 1947 the gallery made the palace its home.
At the end of March 2026 the palace reopened with a new display called Old Masters II, which continues the Old Masters rooms in Schwarzenberg Palace on the square outside. It begins with Italian panels of the 14th and 15th centuries, gathered mostly by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne. Then come Flemish and Dutch rooms arranged around Antwerp, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Leiden, with Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and the Haarlem portraitist Frans Hals among the painters. Another room holds Russian icons collected by Nikodim Kondakov, a Russian art historian who spent his last years in Prague.
