Kinsky Palace, Prague

Kinsky Palace in Prague, Czechia, is an 18th‑century city palace constructed between 1755 and 1765 in the Rococo style with rising Classicist influences, built for Count Johann Ernst Wenzel von der Goltz. Erected on Prague’s Old Town Square on the footprints of two medieval houses, the palace became a prominent urban residence whose owners, uses, and events tied it to the civic and cultural life of the city over two centuries.

Construction took place in the middle of the 1700s and incorporated fabric from the older buildings on the site. After the death of the original owner the property changed hands in 1768, when the Bohemian noble Kinsky family acquired it and gave the building the name it still bears. Under Kinsky ownership the interior fittings were altered toward Classicist taste, a Baroque annex was added, and in 1835 the palace was remodelled and joined to an adjacent structure.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the palace complex housed educational and residential functions alongside shops. From around 1880 the rear building contained the Imperial‑Royal State Gymnasium, a secondary school with German as the language of instruction. Bertha von Suttner, born a Countess Kinsky, was born in the palace on 9 June 1843. The writer Franz Kafka attended the gymnasium in the rear building from 1893 to 1901, and his father, Hermann Kafka, operated a haberdashery on the ground floor in the years around 1912 to 1918. Between 1922 and 1934 the palace accommodated the legation and later the embassy of the Polish Republic.

In 1948 Klement Gottwald addressed the public from the palace balcony, with dates for that appearance reported variously as 25 January 1948 and as occurring during the February 1948 events linked to the Czechoslovak coup d’état; some accounts also confuse the balcony appearance with a separate speech given on Wenceslas Square on 21 January. From 1949 the National Gallery Prague began using the building as a space for exhibitions; it serves the National Gallery’s general directorate and houses permanent displays, including collections of Asian art and Czech landscape painting. The palace entered the List of National Cultural Monuments of the Czech Republic in 1962.