Information
Oranienburg Palace dates back to 1651, when a rural mansion was built for the Great Elector’s wife, Louise Henriette of Orange-Nassau. At the end of the seventeenth century, her son, King Frederick I in Prussia, had the palace expanded and magnificently furnished.
The Oranienburg Palace Museum now houses a compilation of masterful works of art, which include an outstanding set of seventeenth-century furniture made of ivory, once belonging to Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen. The painting collection includes more than 100 works by Flemish and Dutch artists such as Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Bonaventura Peeters, Jan Lievens, Govert Flinck, Moyses van Wtenbroeck, Gerard van Honthorst, Adriaen Hanneman, Johannes Mijtens, Otto Marseus van Schrieck and many more. Life-size portraits of the English king Charles I and his wife by Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Backer’s Allegory of the Dutch Republic, and two seventeenth-century views of Pernambuco belong to the Oranienburg masterpieces, as well as portrait sculptures by the Flemish artist François Dieussart and the Amsterdam sculptor Bartholomeus Eggers.
Many of the artworks date back to the collections of the Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg (1620-1688) and King Frederick I (1657-1713), who employed several Dutch artists as court painters. Other paintings came to Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century as part of the ʺOrange Inheritanceʺ of stadholder Frederick Hendrik of Orange-Nassau and his successors.
Dr. Alexandra Bauer, Curator of German, Dutch and Flemish Paintings (May 2020)
Oranienburg Palace is administered by the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens.
Collection catalogues
Schloss Oranienburg: ein Inventar aus dem Jahre 1743
Gerd Bartoschek (ed.)
Berlin 2001