The Poniński family and changes to the Royal Townhouse

Shortly after Józef Rzewuski’s death in 1816 in Lviv, the household effects were transported to Warsaw, and Count Aleksander Franciszek Chodkiewicz (1776–1836) sold the townhouse to Princess Helena Ponińska, née Górska (1791–1853), wife of Karol Henryk (1789–1830). Ponińska, a writer and social activist, stayed at her Lviv home only occasionally and used the property primarily for ceremonial and social purposes. Traditionally, throughout the 19th century, the ground floor of the townhouse housed shops and merchants’ warehouses; she also let out rooms to tenants.

Shortly after Ponińska purchased the house, the Lviv City Council issued an order in 1820 to remove the stone galleries in the courtyard, which were in danger of collapsing; at the same time, it agreed to the construction of an outbuilding on the site. On the other side of the courtyard, stables and a coach house were built.

From the mid-1820s onwards, the Poniński family regularly carried out repairs and renovations to the property. From 1826, Antoni Bauman (1809–c. 1895), son of the architect and stucco artist Fryderyk, carried out stucco decorations on the fireplaces in the state rooms on the first floor. Princess Ponińska, who paid particular attention to the preservation of the stucco work in the piano nobile rooms, often issued precise instructions regarding the materials and colour schemes of the interiors. In 1831, at her behest, the mosaicist Jan Ziółkowski applied stucco to the walls of the mosaic salon. Between 1832 and 1834, the attic wall on the façade was repaired, the roofs were rebuilt and covered with shingles. In 1836, a completely new roof was constructed over the front building according to a design sent from Vienna. At that time, both entrance halls and the courtyard were repaved. In 1850, further renovation work was carried out on the house, organised by Joseph Engel (1819–1888), an architect and municipal building contractor. The works included, amongst other things, the renovation of the hallways, staircases, and the state and residential interiors. The glazed gallery on the first floor, facing the courtyard, was most likely built in 1851.

The Princess, who died in Lviv in 1853, bequeathed the Lviv townhouse, together with its furnishings, to her son Kalikst (1824–1902). In the summer of 1864, the owner of the townhouse carried out restoration work on the façade without permission, during which the rustication was chiselled away and part of the façade was painted black. It was not until 1874 that the order to cover the roofs with fire-resistant galvanised sheet metal was carried out. To mark the bicentenary celebrations of the Battle of Vienna in September 1883, a plaque bearing the inscription ‘King John III Sobieski lived here’ was unveiled on the façade of the tenement house, and the prince opened the stately interiors to the public.

The establishment of the King Jan III National Museum in Lviv

Kalikst Poniński died childless in 1902, and his estate passed to the Lubomirski family as his closest relatives. In 1908, the Lviv City Council purchased the unfurnished townhouse from the heirs and took over the administration of the building. By a resolution passed in August 1908, the City Council designated the building to house the King Jan III National Museum.

The purchased tenement house was in a state of disrepair and had not been renovated for a long time. By the time the museum opened on 12 September 1908, only cleaning and minor repairs had been carried out. The collections gathered by that time were housed in the rooms on the first and second floors of the front building. The central room on the first floor, known as the Throne Room, was dedicated exclusively to the memory of King John III.

Conservation work on the former Royal Townhouse

Conservation work on the building was carried out over a period of time and funded by the city and subsidies from the Galician Provincial Assembly. The renovation began with the ground-floor rooms, where Gothic and Renaissance vaults were uncovered. Between 1911 and 1912, work was carried out on the front façade; the entrance portal was restored and the plinth reconstructed. The shop entrances were converted into barred window openings, and the rustication was levelled across the entire façade. The parapet wall was repaired, whilst the sculptures were cleaned and missing features were restored. Subsequently, the entrance hall, roof and cellars were renovated. By the end of 1913, on the first floor of the rear building, the original shape of the chamber with its Renaissance ceiling had been restored and the painted frieze reconstructed; the staircase was refurbished, and the bricked-up stairs leading to the second floor were uncovered. In 1917, the first phase of restoration work on the tenement house was completed.

The Royal Tenement and two Lviv museums

In 1912, the museum exhibition was expanded to include further rooms, including those located in the southern outbuilding. In 1920, in the face of the impending Bolshevik invasion of the city, part of the collection was evacuated to Kraków. After the museum artefacts returned to Lviv in July 1921, work began on arranging the exhibition, which reopened in September of that year to coincide with the First Eastern Fair. At that time, the building housed two institutions: the Jan III National Museum and the Historical Museum of the City of Lviv.

Work on the reconstruction of the arcaded cloisters in the courtyard was carried out between 1926 and 1931. In 1927, the restoration of the cloisters on Blacharska Street (now Fedorowycza Street) was completed. Three years later, the Conservation Office granted permission to demolish the 19th-century southern outbuilding and to reconstruct the arcades that had previously stood in its place. The works, supervised by the renowned Lviv architect Wawrzyniec Dayczak (1882–1968), involved the construction of a new structure comprising reinforced concrete vaults supported by stone columns. The arcades, cornices, floors and balustrades were constructed using local materials. The next stage of the work involved the refurbishment of the courtyard, where architectural elements salvaged from demolished Lviv tenement houses, as well as historic cannons, were placed in the reconstructed galleries. The last repairs to the tenement house before the outbreak of the Second World War took place in 1937 in connection with a national congress of museologists held at that time.

Summary

Thanks to the initiative of the historian and archivist Aleksander Czołowski (1865–1944) and the commitment of the Vice-Mayor of Lviv, Tadeusz Rutowski (1852–1919), the former merchant’s, and later noble, tenement house was converted at the beginning of the 20th century into the headquarters of one of Lviv’s most important museums and continues to serve this purpose to this day. Today, the interiors of the Royal Townhouse largely reflect the appearance of a nineteenth-century house, whilst the building’s architecture also retains stylistic elements from earlier periods.