The National Museum celebrates its 150th anniversary with the reconstruction of the main building

The former Patriotic Museum in Bohemia was established two centuries ago at the initiative of several prominent members of the Czech nobility, particularly Count Kaspar of Sternberg, the highest burgrave Count František Antonín Kolovrat, and Count Prokop Hartman. Initially, it had the character of private non-public collections with a primary focus on natural sciences. Its first home was the Sternberg Palace in Hradčany, and in the mid-1840s, the museum moved to the Nostitz Palace on Na Příkopech.

It was not until half a century later that the Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia got a truly representative seat. The neo-Renaissance palace with a gilded dome, which is unmistakable from, for example, Letná, was built near the demolished New Horse Gate, in a place where the New Town walls stood until 1875. Looking at the current position of the museum between two directions of a busy thoroughfare, one can hardly imagine that the building originally sat in the middle of a tranquil park that freely connected to the former Horse Market.

The museum ramp was supposed to include a planned monument to Prince Václav, but the author of the statue, Josef Václav Myslbek, disagreed, and architect Josef Schulz ultimately lost; the equestrian statue stands several meters lower in the square. Schulz's creation, inspired also by the building of the New Hermitage in St. Petersburg, is nevertheless rich in artistic decoration. Leading artists, including Myslbek or his colleagues Jan Štursa and Ladislav Šaloun, painters Václav Brožík, Vojtěch Hynais, and Julius Mařák participated in its creation.

Even the grand decoration of both the exterior and interior - the Pantheon, especially impressive with its sculptures and paintings recalling Czech history, which was Schulz's trump card in the competition - did not persuade the public to immediately take a liking to the building. Reservations were even expressed by the museum staff for whom the building was constructed. The project almost did not account for storage, and apart from exhibition spaces and offices, it only included storage for 300,000 volumes and a not very large storage room for mineral and rock collections.

The aforementioned shortcomings became apparent during its operational use; indeed, the size was insufficient even for its most famous exhibit, the skeleton of a sperm whale. The whale, which was presented to the public in 1893, was too long and had to be shortened by several tail vertebrae before being displayed. The appearance of the new museum palace was also marred by the omnipresent smoke from chimneys and factories at the time. "If this continues, in five years it will look like the inside of a chimney and the collections will appear like pigs in a rural smokehouse," lamented Jan Neruda.

However, the writer's grim prediction did not come true (the facade of the National Museum, however, suffered for many years from pollutants and only the current reconstruction has revealed it in all its bright beauty, and the museum now shines above Wenceslas Square), yet the leadership of the institution soon began to contemplate ideas for expansion. Shortly before World War I, plans emerged for an annex to be built on the site of Čelakovský Gardens. However, the project did not see realization, nor did several others.

The museum had to wait until 2006 for more spaces in the immediate vicinity when it acquired the building of the former Federal Assembly. Five years later, preparations for reconstruction began when the last visitors left the historic building on July 7, 2011, and the moving of the collections began - with the exception of the skeleton of the sperm whale, a giraffe, and an elephant, which remained on site throughout the repairs that finally began in 2015 after several delays. The work is expected to be completely finished next year.