If you have art-loving clients in Prague, make sure they get a few hours in the Lobkowicz Palace Museum. The Lobkowicz Collections may well be the oldest and largest privately owned art collection in the Czech Republic, and the Museum’s 22 galleries have some classic masterpieces (like Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Haymaking), decorative arts (like the largest and best preserved Delft dinner service still in existence) and a collection of arms and military artifacts.
The Collection was amassed over more than six centuries, and has remained in the Lobkowicz clan for all that time (except for when it was confiscated first by Nazis and then by Communists—amazingly, the family was able to get all the art back).
Music fans will also find plenty to admire in the Collection: Josef František Maximilian, the Seventh Prince Lobkowicz (1772-1816), was one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s three principal patrons. In gratitude for his patronage, Beethoven dedicated, among other works, his third, fifth and sixth Symphonies to the Prince. The museum’s Music Room has rare, original and first-printed edition manuscripts of compositions by Beethoven, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Visitors can also see scores with alterations, corrections and annotations done in the hand of Beethoven and Mozart
Visitors can take audio tours of the museum (narrated by members of the Lobkowicz family) at their leisure and then attend a daily concert focusing on Czech and international classical music. As amazing as the Collection sounds, though, we say it can’t possibly compare with the views across Prague and the Vltava River from the Lobkowicz Palace Café.
