Schloss Jägerhof: A Rococo Pleasure Palace in Düsseldorf
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.2
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page9 sections
History
Schloss Jägerhof is a Rococo pleasure palace in Düsseldorf, Germany, built between 1752 and 1763 for Elector Karl Theodor. Designed as a Lustschloss, a palace intended for leisure, courtly display, and recreation, it also served as the seat of the chief master of the hunt. The palace stood in Pempelfort, outside the city gates at the time, and formed part of Karl Theodor’s plans for the Duchy of Jülich-Berg.
Earlier hunting estate and the revival of Pempelfort
An earlier Jägerhof is recorded from the middle of the seventeenth century. It stood approximately near the present palace within an animal park and became the seat of the electoral forestry administration in 1694. Düsseldorf’s position changed after the death of Elector Johann Wilhelm in 1716 and the departure of his widow on 10 September 1717. The city lost its status as a residential city, its buildings deteriorated, and the Jägerhof site remained unused for several decades.
Karl Theodor revived the area as part of his wider plans for Jülich-Berg. Johann Joseph Couven prepared the first palace plans in 1749. His scheme included a central tower, side wings, and a diversion of the Düssel around the building. Nicolas de Pigage, the chief building director, simplified the design and implemented only part of it. The palace was completed in 1762 without its planned side wings, and it served as the residence of the chief masters of the hunt until 1795.
Hofgarten and electoral use
Between 1769 and 1771, under electoral governor Johann Ludwig Franz von Goltstein, the older section of the Hofgarten and the riding avenue were converted into public parkland. The work also provided relief during poverty caused by several failed harvests between 1769 and 1771. A court gardener’s house with a restaurant was added in 1770. The palace and its grounds consequently became part of a larger designed landscape connected to Düsseldorf’s developing public park.
War, occupation, and Prussian residence
In 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars, French troops nearly destroyed the Jägerhof and the court gardener’s house. They looted the palace and cut down much of the Hofgarten for timber. The building was then used as a French military hospital and as night lodging, remaining in poor condition until Napoleon’s four-day visit in 1811. It was hurriedly renovated and furnished for the emperor and Empress Marie Louise. Adolph von Vagedes prepared a plan to convert the palace in the Classicist manner, but the proposal was not initially carried out.
After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Rhineland became Prussian territory. Prince Frederick of Prussia, a division commander, moved into the palace in 1821, although the existing rooms were considered too small. Couven’s earlier plans and Vagedes’s proposals were revived, and side wings were added under construction director Anton Schnitzler. Members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Prussian ruling family, continued to use the palace during the nineteenth century. Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, lived there in the 1850s before becoming Prussian prime minister in 1858 and moving to Berlin. The palace remained associated with the Hohenzollern residence until 1885.
Municipal ownership and twentieth-century destruction
The enlarged palace was still considered too small and unsuitable for a member of the Prussian royal family. In 1909, the state sold it, together with the rear garden, to the city of Düsseldorf. The city demolished the nineteenth-century side wings because they extended 1.7 metres beyond the new alignment of the widened Jacobistraße. Most surrounding trees were felled, and much of the palace park was sold as building land.
During the French military occupation in 1925, the building was confiscated and used as the commandant’s headquarters. The consistory of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland occupied it from 1934, but its lease was unlawfully terminated under pressure from Nazi regional leader Friedrich Karl Florian. The Düsseldorf Nazi regional leadership office moved into the palace on 30 January 1937. A heavy air raid on 12 June 1943 severely damaged the building, and the regional office moved to the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court.
Architect Helmut Hentrich rebuilt Schloss Jägerhof in 1950. Receptions of the early Federal Republic were held there. The palace became a museum in 1955, first for Düsseldorf’s city museum and later for the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia. That collection moved to a new building on Grabbeplatz in 1986.
The Goethe Museum
Since 1987, Schloss Jägerhof has housed the Goethe Museum and the Ernst Schneider Foundation. The museum’s permanent exhibition focuses on the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while changing exhibitions address intellectual and literary history. Goethe stayed in 1774 and 1792 at the nearby house of philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, which has been occupied by the artists’ association Malkasten since 1861. A foundation agreement signed by Düsseldorf on 13 February 1953 committed the city to furnishing, maintaining, and developing the collection of the Anton and Katharina Kippenberg Foundation. Anton Kippenberg was a publisher and Goethe collector.
Remains
Schloss Jägerhof stands at Jacobistraße 2 in Düsseldorf-Pempelfort, west of the Hofgarten and near the city centre. The surviving palace is the central wing of a Rococo composition that once included nineteenth-century side wings. It forms the visual focal point, or point de vue, of the Hofgarten’s riding avenue and Jägerhofstraße. After the side wings were demolished, the central building was left with a small fenced forecourt. The palace originally occupied a much larger landscaped setting, although most of the former park was later cleared and sold as building land.
Palace and garden complex
The central palace follows the design prepared by Johann Joseph Couven in 1749 and modified by Nicolas de Pigage. Couven’s proposed central tower, side wings, and diverted course of the Düssel were only partly realised. The building was completed without side wings in 1762, while the wings added under Anton Schnitzler in the nineteenth century were later removed after the city acquired the property. The associated garden complex included the Hofgärtnerhaus, a court gardener’s residence with a restaurant built in 1770. The former palace park also contained The Seasons, a group created in 1774 by Josef Bäumgen, a Düsseldorf professor of sculpture.
Hunting-equipment house and carved gables
North of the palace, at the corner of Pempelforter Straße and Jacobistraße, stood a former mews and hunting-equipment complex. Elector Johann Wilhelm commissioned the building in 1713, and three gables from the workshop of Baroque sculptor Gabriël Grupello decorated it. After the city acquired the property in 1909, the old building was demolished and replaced by an orangery, which incorporated the carved gables.
The orangery and the building bearing the carvings were destroyed during the air raid of 1943. Parts of two gable fields, the shaped upper sections of the gables, were salvaged and placed in storage. One fragment is the Baroque principal gable with alliance coats of arms, which combine the arms of two related or allied families. A fragmentary east gable carries dense hunting scenes and hunting symbols. The surviving carvings were entered in Düsseldorf’s monument list as a movable monument in 2012 and taken to the city’s Restoration Centre in 2014 for conservation and wood-carving work by Alexander Diczig.
