The seventeen working designs for stained-glass windows in St Nicholas’s Cathedral in Fribourg, Switzerland, by MNK Mehoffer are exceptional works within the artist’s entire artistic legacy. The Fribourg collection comprises a total of twenty-one cartoons, four of which were owned by the National Museum in Kraków (they were acquired between 2014 and 2019 thanks to financial support from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage), twelve remained on deposit at the National Museum in Kraków, and five were held at the Museum of Art and History in Fribourg.
Created over a period of more than forty years (1895–1936), the cartoons for the stained-glass windows in the side-aisle chapels and the chancel of St Nicholas’s Cathedral in Freiburg represent the life’s work of Józef Mehoffer and, following their acquisition, will form the most important and central part of the Mehoffer collection at the National Museum in Kraków. It is thanks to these works that Mehoffer secured a lasting, prominent place in European art history. At the same time, they reflect the artistic transformations in the art of that period – from the decline of historicism, through the successive phases of Art Nouveau, to the geometric stylistic elements of the interwar years. The acquisition of this extremely valuable collection, which is of exceptional importance to Polish cultural heritage, is a significant event for Polish museology.
Thanks to this acquisition, the National Museum in Kraków now holds a world-class, complete collection of works by Józef Mehoffer.
The Mehoffer collection is one of the most valuable in the National Museum in Kraków’s holdings. It comprises a set of objects forming the interior of the MNK Mehoffer House, a branch of the National Museum in Kraków, and a unique collection of large-format designs in the field of monumental painting, which are masterpieces of European decorative art.
Project title: Acquisition for the collections of the National Museum in Krakow of seventeen working designs for stained-glass windows in St Nicholas’s Cathedral in Freiburg, by MNK Mehoffer
date of signing the funding agreement: September 2023
funding amount: PLN 8,278,744.49
total project value: PLN 8,278,744.49
