Drottningholm Palace

One island, four places: the palace, the Court Theatre, Kina Slott and the parks

Drottningholm is on the island of Lovön in Lake Mälaren, west of Stockholm. It is not one sight but four: the palace, the Court Theatre, the pleasure palace Kina Slott and the large park around them. Together they are a UNESCO World Heritage site, the first in Sweden. Each part has its own tickets, its own opening hours and its own website, so each one has its own section below.

Drottningholm Palace

History

Drottningholm began in the late 1500s, when King John III built a stone palace for Queen Catherine Jagiellon. The name means “Queen’s Islet.” Queen Dowager Hedvig Eleonora bought the castle in 1661. It burned to the ground on 30 December that same year. She rebuilt it with architect Nicodemus Tessin the Elder from 1662. His son, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, finished the work after his father’s death in 1681 (Kungliga slotten gives 1682). Through the 1700s, it was the royal court’s regular summer home.

Drottningholm stayed a palace for royal women. In 1744 it was a wedding gift to Princess Lovisa Ulrika of Prussia when she married the Swedish heir, Adolf Fredrik. Her time here was a golden age for culture. She gave the palace French-inspired rococo interiors, and Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) worked here on the royal natural history collection.

In 1777 the Swedish state bought Drottningholm. Stockholms läns museum says this was because of her debts. Gustav III then lived here and had the English park made. After the 1809 coup, the deposed King Gustav IV Adolf was held here under guard for eleven days.

The palace then fell into disuse: King Charles XIV John largely abandoned it as a symbol of the old dynasty, though a public tour is recorded as early as 1819. King Gustav V began a four-year restoration in 1907 to bring it back to its 18th-century look. Since 1981, King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia have lived in the southern part of the palace. Those rooms are private. Most of the palace and the park are open to visitors all year.

Inside the palace: the state rooms

The state rooms have information signs in Swedish and English. The facts in this section follow those signs, unless the text names another source.

The Lower North Guardroom: gilt leather and a camel

The palace has four guardrooms. They stand next to the vestibules on each floor. Guards used them to keep unauthorized visitors away from the apartments.

The walls here have gilt leather. In the 1600s it was a luxury wall covering. It is painted calfskin with a pattern in relief. It looks like gold, but the shine usually comes from silver under a tan varnish. The motif is the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

The large painting shows a camel and its keeper. Court painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl painted it in 1689. Count Nils Bielke gave the animal to King Karl XI. The sign calls it a dromedary. The camel and its keeper lived at Drottningholm and on Djurgården.

Ehrenstrahl also painted the portraits of Karl XI’s generals in this room. One of them is Field Marshal Erik Dahlbergh. He made the drawings for the book Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna.

Hedvig Eleonora and her state rooms

The first state room is the Green Drawing Room. The original 1600s doors have a crowned monogram: HERS. It stands for Hedvig Eleonora Regina Sueciæ, Hedvig Eleonora, Queen of Sweden.

In the 1600s the State Bedchamber was an audience room. The queen received her most important guests here. Her private bedroom was in the southern part of the palace. Nicodemus Tessin the Elder began the interior in 1668.

The paintings remember the marriage of Hedvig Eleonora and King Karl X Gustav. In the ceiling, their hands join under the all-seeing eye of divine providence.

Queen Lovisa Ulrika got the right to use the palace in 1744. She chose the State Bedchamber as her private bedroom. The bed and the alcove textiles come from her time. Her son Gustav III took over the palace in 1777 and used his mother’s old bedroom. In the French style, he held le lever: a reception in the room while he did his morning toilette.

The Ehrenstrahl Drawing Room was also Hedvig Eleonora’s audience chamber. Ehrenstrahl painted the allegorical paintings on its walls between 1692 and 1695. One painting shows how she ruled for her young son Karl XI, and how she gave him the power.

War, war booty and a ceiling from Denmark

Hedvig Eleonora made two memorial galleries. One is for her husband, Karl X Gustav. The battle paintings on the walls are by Johan Philip Lemke, from the 1690s, after drawings by Erik Dahlberg. One wall shows the war with Poland, 1654–1658, with the three-day Battle of Warsaw. The opposite wall shows the war with Denmark. In the winter of 1658 the Swedish army marched over the frozen Belts to Copenhagen. The Treaty of Roskilde gave Sweden the Scanian provinces and Bohuslän.

The Hall of Generals honors Karl XII, his generals and his battles. His sister, Ulrika Eleonora the Younger, collected the portraits. She followed her brother as regent in 1718. The ceiling painting is by Gerrit van Honthorst, from 1643. It hung first in Kronborg Castle in Denmark. It came to Sweden in 1659 as spoils of war.

War booty was normal in the 1600s. Written rules came later. Wikipedia names the Lieber Code of 1863 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as early codified bans on pillage. Today the International Criminal Court treats pillage as a war crime.

The bronze sculptures in the Baroque Garden have the same story. See the parks below.

Three Ulrikas and a library

Three women in this palace share the name Ulrika. Ulrika Eleonora of Denmark was engaged to Karl XI, and Ehrenstrahl painted the engagement. Ulrika Eleonora the Younger was the sister of Karl XII. Lovisa Ulrika of Prussia came to Sweden in 1744 as the wife of Adolf Fredrik.

After a large rebuild in 1747, Lovisa Ulrika got new rooms for her collections of art, books and natural history specimens. The Library was first a mirror gallery for her museum collections. Around 1760 work began to turn it into a library. The last large catalogue, from 1797, lists 2,530 works in 7,418 volumes. The National Library of Sweden now manages the books. The botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) helped her organize and catalog the collections. Wikipedia says she wrote letters to Voltaire for most of her life.

Gustav III received the right to use the palace in 1777. He refurnished a suite of rooms on the second floor. One of them is the Blue Drawing Room, an informal room for the king and his nearest gentlemen-in-waiting.

The Hall of State

The Hall of State is the big ceremonial hall. The painted ceiling from 1699 is what remains of the original interior. It shows the birth of Pandora. Johan Sylvius started it and Evrard Chauveau finished it. In the 1700s the room served many uses, also as a theatre. In 1744 the wedding of Crown Prince Adolf Fredrik and Princess Lovisa Ulrika took place here. Johan Helmich Roman wrote the Drottningholm Music for it. Swedish royal events still use it. King Oskar I and Queen Josefina renovated the hall in 1856–1858 and made it a gallery of living rulers.

The staircase: painted marble

Look closely at the staircase. The walls and the ceiling are painted to look like marble. The round reliefs are paintings too. They look like carved stone. One of them shows Justice with scales and a crowned shield. Statues stand in niches along the stairs. Wikipedia says they show the nine muses, made by Nicolaes Millich.

The Chinese Drawing Room (Kinesiska salongen)

This room is inside the palace, so do not mix it up with Kina Slott in the park. It is right above Hedvig Eleonora’s State Bedchamber. A hidden staircase connects the two rooms. In the middle of the 1700s it was King Adolf Fredrik’s bedroom. His queen, Lovisa Ulrika, slept downstairs.

Gustav III made the room a conversation room. He added the tiled stove (kakelugn) in chinoiserie style. That gave the room its name. The stove was made in St. Petersburg. The woven tapestry is from 1779. It was made at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. A gobelin is a woven tapestry, named after that manufactory. Carle van Loo drew the design. It shows the hero Theseus and the bull of Marathon. Louis XVI gave the tapestry to Gustav III in Paris in 1784.

China made goods for the European market. The country was closed to foreigners. Even so, Europeans loved it, or loved an idea of it. The style is called chinoiserie. The Swedish East India Company brought many of the goods to Sweden.

The piece of furniture that looks like a bureau is a pull-out bed for a page. Pages were of noble birth and part of the court. Georg Haupt made it for Gustav III’s summer retreat Ekolsund.

Oskar Hall and the Hero and Leander tapestries

King Oskar II celebrated 25 years on the throne in 1897. Several rooms were refurnished for the silver jubilee. The architect Agi Lindegren used the designs of Nicodemus Tessin the Elder as a model. The centre of the room is a set of tapestries with the Greek myth of Hero and Leander. They were woven in the 1630s in Mortlake, England, for King Charles I. Count Johan Oxenstierna later gave them to Karl X Gustav and Hedvig Eleonora as a wedding gift. How the count got them is not known.

The Palace Church

The Palace Church is in the round building at the north end of the palace. Tessin the Younger finished the building in the early 1700s, from his father’s drawings. Carl Hårleman led the interior work, and the church was consecrated in 1730. It has been in use since then. The local Lovö parish holds services here on the last weekend of each month, and everyone is welcome. Several royal children were baptized here, among them Princess Leonore and Prince Alexander.

The Court Theatre (Drottningholms slottsteater)

The Court Theatre was built in 1766 for Queen Lovisa Ulrika. The architect was Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz. An earlier theatre on the same spot had burned down. Guides describe this as the third theatre built here: the first was pulled down for being too small, and the second burned to the ground.

The front of the building is plain. Inside is one of the best-preserved 18th-century interiors in the world. Here too, much of the marble is paint. The consoles are papier-mâché and the pilasters are plaster. The theatre’s website says the salon holds about 400 guests today; other sources give 450 seats.

The stage machinery is made of wood and is still worked by hand, with winches, rollers, drums, blocks, ropes and counterweights. It can change a whole scene in front of the audience in seconds. About 30 historical sets are still in use. One of them, a temple scene, was most likely painted by Carlo Galli Bibiena himself. The theatre says it is the only known surviving stage set painted by him. According to the theatre, it is the only 18th-century theatre in the world that still uses its original stage machinery in regular performances.

The seats followed a strict hierarchy. The King and Queen sat on the balcony. A separate “incognito” balcony let some people watch the audience without being seen. During the summer season, the theatre was also a home: the architect had the first room, and theatre workers, actors and their families lived there too – over 100 people in total. A curtain at the back of the hall was Gustav III’s own idea. It let the public take their seats after the court had already sat down. Then it lifted, so they could watch the play as well.

The theatre’s great period began in 1777, when Gustav III took over Drottningholm. Operas by Gluck, French comic opera and pantomime ballets played here. After Gustav III was murdered at the Stockholm Opera House in 1792, the theatre closed. It became a storage room and was forgotten. In 1921 the literary historian Agne Beijer rediscovered it. After a restoration with new ropes for the machinery and electric light, it opened again in 1922.

A scale model of the theatre stage stands in the palace. Munir Warda and Adam Wetterhielm built it over three years. It was handed to King Carl XVI Gustaf as a birthday present on 30 April 2016.

Kina Slott (the Chinese Pavilion)

On a July evening in 1753, Queen Lovisa Ulrika got a birthday surprise. At the far end of the park, King Adolf Fredrik had secretly put up a small pleasure palace in Chinese style. It was a prefabricated wooden building. Ten years later rot had damaged it, and in 1763 the foundation stone of the present Kina Slott was laid. The architect was Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz.

It was an old summer palace built on a fantasy. All things Chinese were in fashion. The East India companies brought tea, spices, silk, porcelain and art to Europe. China looked like an exotic fairy-tale land, and Kina Slott is that fantasy in buildings. The lacquer-red facades show good knowledge of Chinese building art, but the body of the building is European rococo.

Inside, Swedish rococo furniture stands with imported Chinese and Japanese objects. Several rooms still have their original Chinese silk and paper wall coverings. The collections were listed in an inventory in 1777, when the state took over Drottningholm. Most of the objects in that list are still in their original places. This makes Kina Slott one of the most authentic examples of European chinoiserie from the 1700s.

Next to it is the dining pavilion called Confidencen. The table was set on the floor below and lifted up into the dining room on a signal. The royals could eat without servants in the room – “en confidence”.

Near Kina Slott lies Kanton, a small industrial village from the 1750s and 1760s. It made silk, lace and metal goods, and about ten of its buildings remain. The painter Evert Lundquist later had his studio in the old machine house near Kina Slott.

The parks

A walk through the park is a walk through three garden ideals: a strict formal garden from the late 1600s, a free English park started about 100 years later, and smaller bosquets from the 1760s near Kina Slott. A garden was here even earlier, in John III’s time.

The Baroque Garden

Queen Hedvig Eleonora started the Baroque Garden in the late 1600s. Tessin the Elder and Tessin the Younger planned it after the new palace gardens in France: strict, clipped and symmetrical. Four rows of lime trees frame it. Closest to the palace is the embroidery parterre, a pattern of clipped box hedges and coloured gravel. Above it is the water parterre, with 12 small fountains and the Hercules fountain in the centre. The garden fell into decay in the 1800s. Gustav VI Adolf had it restored in the 1950s and 1960s.

The bronze sculptures are copies. The originals are by the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries. They came to Sweden as war booty from Prague in 1648 and from Frederiksborg in Denmark in 1659. Around 1718 there were 32 bronze sculptures in the park. Weather damaged the originals, so modern casts replaced them. The originals are now in Museum de Vries, the largest collection of his work in the world.

The garden around Kina Slott

In the middle of the 1700s, gardens moved away from the strict ideal toward a more natural park. Lovisa Ulrika followed the new ideas. Adelcrantz planted chestnut avenues around Kina Slott as sight lines out into the landscape. East of the pavilion, the bosquets had large cages for exotic birds. One cage remains, much changed. A menagerie was also here; only a pond is left.

The English Park

Gustav III took over Drottningholm in 1777 and wanted a natural landscape park in the English style. Fredrik Magnus Piper had studied English gardens in England. In 1780 he got the task to make one north of the Baroque Garden. Stockholms läns museum gives 1778 as the start. The park has two ponds with canals, islands and bridges, large lawns, and trees in avenues and groups. Paths wind around it, and sight lines open views over the landscape. Many monuments were planned, but only a Gothic tower was built.

World Heritage

Drottningholm came onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991, as the first site in Sweden. The listing covers the palace, the Court Theatre, Kina Slott and the park on Lovön. UNESCO calls the complex the finest example in Sweden of an 18th-century royal residence. It shows French influence from Versailles, together with Chinese and other Asian-inspired elements.

Photo gallery

All photographs on this page were taken by Zayera Khan during a visit to Drottningholm, and are her own property. Please do not reuse them without permission.

Today

Drottningholm remains the King and Queen’s real, working home, and at the same time one of the most complete surviving pictures of an 18th-century European royal court – right down to a theatre that still changes its own scenery the way it did 250 years ago.