Drottningholm Palace
After 1661 the Queen Dowager Hedvig Eleonora had Tessin the Elder build a new palace on Lovö. With its symmetrical façade, its staircase and its Baroque garden on the French model, it became the summer residence of Sweden’s age of greatness. The palace, together with its theatre and the Chinese Pavilion, has been a World Heritage Site since 1991.
There was already a palace on Lovö that John III had built for Queen Catherine Jagiellon, hence the name Drottningholm, “Queen’s Islet”. It burned down in 1661, the same year that the Queen Dowager Hedvig Eleonora bought the island. She commissioned Nicodemus Tessin the Elder to build a new palace, and work began in 1662. Hedvig Eleonora was one of the most powerful people of her time and ruled as regent for her son Charles XI. The palace was to display the ambitions of the new great power, following models from France and Italy. When Tessin the Elder died in 1681, his son Nicodemus Tessin the Younger took over the work, particularly the interiors and the garden. The palace is built of brick with rendered façades, and sandstone was used for portals and details.
The central section is occupied by a large staircase, with stucco by the Italian Carove brothers, painted ceilings and statues, which receives visitors and leads up to the state apartments. Hedvig Eleonora’s State Bedchamber is one of the most magnificent Swedish Baroque interiors, with paintings by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl. Lovisa Ulrika’s library from the 1760s, by Jean Eric Rehn, represents a later phase. The Baroque garden with parterres and fountains follows an axis out from the palace. Here stand bronze sculptures by Adriaen de Vries, spoils of war from Prague and Denmark in the 17th century. Gustav III later had an English park laid out north of the formal garden, with winding paths and canals. The contrast shows how ideas about gardens changed.
Lovisa Ulrika received the palace as a morning gift in 1744 and made it a centre of culture and science. She had the palace theatre built, which after a fire was replaced in 1766 by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz’s theatre. It still has its 18th-century stage machinery, one of the oldest in the world still in use. During the 19th century the palace often stood empty, but it was restored in the early 20th century. Since 1981 it has been the permanent home of the royal family. The palace, the theatre, the Chinese Pavilion and the park became a World Heritage Site in 1991. Drottningholm presents Sweden’s age of greatness and the 18th century as a whole, and it became a model for many manor houses around the country, where the staircase, the symmetry and the axial garden were imitated on a smaller scale.