Fürstenhaus Herrenhausen-Museum: A Welf Palace and Former Museum in Hanover
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page8 sections
History
Fürstenhaus Herrenhausen-Museum is a palace in Hanover, Germany, built in 1721 as a half-timbered pleasure house for Louise von Delitz, the daughter of George I of Great Britain and Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Owned by the Welf family, it later served aristocratic residents, a princely guesthouse, and a museum devoted to the history and collections of the House of Hanover.
Foundation and Eighteenth-Century Enlargement
George I commissioned the building for Louise von Delitz, one of three daughters born from his relationship with Melusine, Countess von der Schulenburg. George’s position as both British king and Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg linked the palace to the British monarchy and the ruling dynasty of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The Delitz Palace changed hands several times in the decades that followed and was occupied by various aristocratic families.
Around 1770, the original pleasure house was enlarged. The work produced the basic U-shaped arrangement that survives in the building, with a central projecting section and lower side wings. The courtyard probably received its small formal Baroque garden at this time, possibly through the work of Ernst August Charbonnier, an architect and garden designer active at the Hanoverian court, for the chamberlain von Wallmoden.
Return to the Crown and Nineteenth-Century Changes
In 1836, the palace returned to the crown and was converted into a guesthouse for members of the princely family and court. In 1864 and 1865, shortly before the end of the Kingdom of Hanover, Georg Heinrich Schuster remodelled the facade in accordance with Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves’s planned redesign of Herrenhausen Palace. Laves was a prominent nineteenth-century architect associated with the remodelling of Hanover. The alterations changed the appearance of the earlier half-timbered structure by covering its timbering with yellow, block-patterned plaster and adding wooden surrounds to the windows and doors.
After Prussia annexed the Kingdom of Hanover in 1866, the palace initially housed the portrait collection of the House of Hanover. Its former Baroque garden had already been turned into a kitchen garden in 1852. Construction of the new Herrenhäuser Straße divided the garden from the palace in 1936, and the former garden site across the road has been occupied by the headquarters of the Evangelical Church in Germany since 1984. Unlike Herrenhausen Palace, the Fürstenhaus survived the air raids on Hanover during the Second World War.
Museum and Later Residence
The building opened as the Herrenhausen Museum on 13 August 1955. Following extensive renovation, it reopened on 10 July 1985 under the name Fürstenhaus Herrenhausen-Museum. The museum closed provisionally in 2011. Ernst August, a Welf prince and eldest son of the then head of the Welf family, subsequently used the palace as a residence during regular visits from London. After his marriage in 2017, he occupied it as his family’s principal residence.
By 2020, the building required renewed renovation because toxic wood-preservative substances had been used during work in the 1980s. The palace is protected as a historic monument under German heritage law.
Remains
The surviving palace combines an eighteenth-century half-timbered core with an enlarged U-shaped plan and a nineteenth-century facade. Its central projecting section faces the courtyard, while lower side wings extend on either side. The courtyard retains the arrangement associated with the small formal garden created around the time of the eighteenth-century enlargement.
Exterior and Courtyard
The original building was a two-storey pleasure house with nine bays, the regular divisions formed by its facade. Enlargement created the present U-shaped complex. Schuster’s remodelling covered the visible half-timbering with yellow rusticated plaster, a textured surface arranged to resemble blocks of masonry, and fitted the windows and doors with wooden surrounds. These changes preserve the outline of the earlier building while giving the exterior its later nineteenth-century character.
Interior Decoration
Parts of the original interior decoration survive. In the vestibule before the central projection, a ceiling painting dated 1721 shows Juno, the Roman goddess associated with marriage and the protection of the state, seated on clouds with a peacock and a putto, a small child figure used in European decorative art. The museum interiors included ten richly furnished residential rooms. One was a games room containing carved seventeenth-century furniture and a seating group associated with Queen Marie.
Historic Collections
The furnishings included valuable furniture, small precious objects, sculptures, graphic works, and porcelain. The oil paintings consisted mainly of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of members of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, together with landscape paintings dating from around 1750. Many works came from the palaces of Herrenhausen, Blankenburg Castle in the Harz, Welf Castle at Herzberg, and Marienburg Castle near Pattensen.
Among the collections was the Herzberg hunting wall-painting series, a group of large oil paintings depicting the four Herzberg brothers. The paintings came to Hanover in 1708 and were first displayed in the Falcon Room of Herrenhausen Palace. Their later association with the museum connected the palace’s rooms with the broader artistic and dynastic holdings of the Welf family.
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