MNK Mehoffer

The brick building at 26 Krupnicza Street was constructed in the 1850s. It belonged to the Rogowski family, the grandparents of Stanisław Wyspiański. The artist was born there in 1869. Later, the building was owned by Józef Szujski—a historian, publicist, poet, and prose writer—who oversaw its reconstruction based on a design by Antoni Łuszczkiewicz and the Tarnowski family.

In 1932, the building was bought by Józef Mehoffer (1869–1946) and his wife Janina (1871–1956). The new residents carried out the last reconstruction of the house, calling it the “palace under the cones” from the decorative wooden pinecones decorating the staircase. The décor also came to include woodcarved elements, replicas of stone keystones from Wawel Cathedral, and decorative coffers of skylights. 

The initiative to create the artist’s biographical museum came from his son, Zbigniew, and grandson, Ryszard. The process of transforming the building into a museum took two decades, between 1986 and 1996. An important stage of adaptation was the arrangement of a garden, modelled on the documentation of two Mehoffer gardens: in Krakow and in Jankówka near Wieliczka. The garden was opened to the public in 2004. 

The layout of the museum’s interiors is a reconstruction of how the rooms looked when they were used by the painter and his family. The decor of the Mehoffer house combines the features of a traditional Polish house with consciously and artistically applied historical elements and the aesthetic features of the 1930s. On the ground floor, there is a large dining room and a living room with an exit to the terrace from the garden, while on the upper floor there are more intimate rooms: bedrooms and offices, along with a “Japanese” room, where a collection of graphics and oriental souvenirs brought to Krakow by Jadwiga Mehofferowa is shown.

An important step toward securing the Mehoffer collection was the National Museum in Krakow’s purchase, in December 2023, of 17 of Mehoffer’s stained glass cartoons for St. Nicholas Church in Fribourg — a complete set of designs created by the artist between 1895 and 1936, considered his life’s work. These large-scale works by Mehoffer can be viewed in the Gallery of 20th- and 21st-Century Art at the Main Building of the National Museum in Krakow.