Manhart's Palace by Karel Stolar - Prague, Czech Republic - Paintings Then and Now on Waymarking.com

The building of the Manhart (or Menhart) house has an early Baroque two-tone façade. When you enter through the left portal, you reach a courtyard decorated with a Baroque sculpture. An 18th-century wood sculpture of Hercules and the Lion is located beneath the stairs. It was probably made by the sculptor and woodcutter Lazar Widmann in the late Baroque period.

The complicated structural history of the building has left Gothic and Renaissance traces. The courtyard originated when the houses on Celetná and Štupartská Street were joined. It was adapted into the Baroque form it has today by a father and son surnamed Kanka around 1700, and F.M. Kanka did some further adaptations in the first half of the 18th century.

In 1706, the house became the property of Count Jan Bedrich Manhart, from there the house gets its name; Manhart was an assessor for the feudal and crown court. Manhart reserved some rooms for public balls and events. He died several years later and his widow started to let the room in the floor of the western part of the object to itinerant acting ensembles.

In 1717, people attended performances by Johann France Seppe’s group here. One year later, Mr. Bonne and his flying men, and Italian and English ropewalkers also performed here. German performers led by Heinrich Brunius stayed performed here for a time, followed in 1723 by the commedia dell’ arte of Tommaso Ristori and the German Mark Maldtmann. Another ensemble head, F. A. Defrain, and his group of German performers staged ‘The Most Honourable Life History and Famous Martyr’s Death of Saint Wenceslas’ six years later.

The Piarists sold Manhart house to the silk merchant Jan Václav Sacher in 1780. The new owner set up a manufactory of silk fabric in the house. He created a connecting passage on the first and second floor, and thus made some of the rooms smaller. He also had a shop with trade goods on the ground floor. The house temporarily acquired a new from its new owner – Sacher House.

The building underwent vast reconstruction at the end of the 1970s and it was renovated mainly for the purposes of the Theatre Institute, which is still based here today, and thus picks up on the house’s theatrical tradition.


The author of this painting is Karel Stolar. Karel Stolar is the book illustrator who is dedicated to creating drawings sights. You can find this painting in book 'Pražské domy vyprávejí V.'
This book is one of a twelve-part series of books describing structural changes and the development of cultural-historical monuments of Prague (houses, villas and palaces, library, banks, school, museum, hospital, farm, etc.).

Website of painting. Exact URL of painting is required: [Web Link] Artist: Karel Stolař Date of Your Photograph: 01/17/2017 Medium of Painting: pen and ink Date of Painting: Not listed

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