This exhibition is curated from the perspective of Liechtenstein’s princes, with eight distinct sections showcasing their wonderful history of collecting by princes. The focus of the exhibition will be the idea of a lasting legacy, on the one hand, and the personal stamp that the individual princely personalities have put on their collecting, on the other.
The exhibition will feature the history of the Princely Collection, from Prince Karl I von Liechtenstein, who founded the collection, to Prince Johann Adam Andreas I, who amassed a Rubens collection of about 50 works, to the current reigning Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein, who took over the regency in an almost hopeless position after the losses of World War II and, with the economic rehabilitation of the family fortune, led the collections to a new high.
Head study of a bearded man Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
Visitors will discover the collecting practices of the Princes of Liechtenstein and the cultural exchanges between the East and Europe in art and architecture. They will also get to experience how Chinese art made its presence in European architecture and decorative arts, pointing out the cultural exchanges between Europe and the East back then.
With more than 120 top-class works of art, the Princely Collections are guests in Hong Kong. In the recently opened Hong Kong Palace Museum, this exhibition is dedicated to the history of the Princely Collections from the 17th century to the present day.
This also defines the path through the exhibition, starting with the first princes Karl I and his son Karl Eusebius I von Liechtenstein in the seventeenth century, who created landmarks with their commissions to Adrian de Fries and the earliest painting by Peter Paul Rubens acquired for the collections. The acquisitions policy of Karl's grandson Johann Adam Andreas I also places Rubens and Anthony van Dyck at the centre of the exhibition.
St Francis before the Crucified Christ (fragment) Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641)
At the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century Karl Eusebius I and Johann Adam Andreas I devoted themselves purposefully to questions of art and architecture, making use of the developing art market. Space is given in the exhibition to the theoretical treatises composed by Karl Eusebius, while selected examples of the correspondence between Johann Adam Andreas and his favourite artists show the visitor the close attention they paid to issues of art and their dealings with artists of their time.
Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein set completely new priorities in the mid-eighteenth century with his interest in the latest French and Italian art, and took the collection onto a new level with the first scholarly survey in the form of Vincenzio Fanti's catalogue, printed in 1776. Joseph Wenzel had assembled one of the most important collections of Venetian veduta painting, sadly decimated in the 1950s when many works from this group had to be sold, but now once again present in the collections as a result of individual works being bought back and others newly acquired during the last decades. These works are also part of the exhibition.
A separate chapter is devoted to the theme of the garden, starting with the baroque garden of the Liechtenstein Garden Palace in the Rossau quarter in Vienna, the first to be transformed into a landscape garden after the death of Prince Joseph Wenzel in 1773. This was followed by the baroque garden at Eisgrub (Lednice) in Southern Moravia in today’s Czech Republic, where subsequently, under Prince Alois I and his brother Prince Johann I, the largest landscape garden in Central Europe, now a World Cultural Heritage Site, was created between the two estates of Eisgrub and Feldsberg (Valtice). While Prince Johann had many other gardens laid out in the same style, here the focus is on the still largely intact landscape around the Liechtenstein ancestral castle in Maria Enzersdorf south of Vienna, which he bought back in 1807.
The reception of Chinese motifs and elements had played an important role in the European art history and history of collecting centuries earlier. In the landscape garden this motif gained new momentum in the eighteenth century and is also reflected at Eisgrub in Joseph Hardtmuth's Chinese Temple. This history of global relations is also explored in the exhibition.
With the transfer of the objects to the Garden Palace from 1807 and the opening of the gallery there in 1810 to the public upon payment of a small fee – an innovation initiated by Prince Johann I von Liechtenstein – the collection, until then hidden away in the City Palace, acquired a new status in the public eye. This was consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century under Prince Johann II when the gallery was reorganized on art-historical principles for the first time by Wilhelm von Bode, the renowned art historian who acted as advisor to the prince.
The gallery remained open in this form until 1938, when following the annexation of Austria by National Socialist Germany, Prince Franz I von Liechtenstein closed the Garden Palace, then called “gallery building”, after Jewish citizens were no longer allowed to be admitted to the gallery.
The final chapters of the exhibition are devoted to the later twentieth century and the present day, focusing on the reconstruction of the collections after the sales of works of art as a result of the Second World War and the expropriation of the family by the Czechoslovak Republic. Ample space is devoted to the subsequent resurgence with a survey of the new acquisitions over the past few decades, most of which have been made by the current reigning Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein.
The Discovery of the Infant Erichthonius Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)