The academy spent a century without a house of its own. When it finally got one, the architect gave it the manner of two hundred years earlier.
At a glance
The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague goes back to 1799, when an academy of drawing was founded by imperial decree of Francis I. It taught for its first century in the Klementinum. Its own building, on the northern edge of the Letná slope above the Royal Game Preserve, was raised between 1898 and 1902 to designs by Václav Roštlapil, in what the Czech heritage register calls a generous Baroque palace manner.
Key facts
- Academy founded: 1799, by imperial decree of Francis I, as an academy of drawing
- First home: the Klementinum
- Reform of 1896: credited to the painter Julius Mařák and the patron Josef Hlávka
- Building: 1898–1902, architect Václav Roštlapil
- Manner: a generous Baroque palace style, in the historicist taste of the period
- Site: the northern edge of the Letná slope, above the Královská obora
- Address: U Akademie 4, Prague 7 (Holešovice)
- GPS: 50.1027, 14.4240 · Open in Google Maps
History
Francis I founded an academy of drawing in Prague in 1799, and for nearly a hundred years it worked inside the Klementinum, the old Jesuit college in the Old Town — rooms borrowed from an institution with other purposes.
The change came with the reform of 1896, which the heritage register credits to the painter Julius Mařák, who taught landscape at the academy, and to Josef Hlávka, the architect and patron whose foundation still funds Czech scholarship. A reformed academy needed a building, and it was given a site out of the old town, on the slope of Letná above the royal hunting park.
Václav Roštlapil built it between 1898 and 1902. He was a historicist, working in Prague since the early 1890s, and the manner he chose for an art academy at the end of the nineteenth century was Baroque — not the Baroque of the city’s churches but the civil, palatial kind, which in 1900 said institution and dignity rather than piety.
The site
Letná is the plateau above the river on the north side, and the academy sits on its northern edge, looking over the Královská obora — the Royal Game Preserve, now the park called Stromovka. It is a deliberate distance from the centre: a building for making things in, with light and room around it, rather than a façade on a crowded street.
What you see
A long symmetrical front with the rhythm of a palace and the openings of a studio building, which is the compromise every nineteenth-century art academy had to make: the north light the painters needed, behind a face the state could recognise as official.
Sources & resources
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