Wilhelmsthal Castle (Calden)

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Wilhelmsthal Palace, the garden facade

The Wilhelmsthal Castle is a castle near the city of Kassel in Calden in northern Hesse Kassel district ( Germany ). The complex was built between 1743 and 1761 and is one of the most important Rococo castles north of the Main . The castle has a large park with water features . The castle building can be visited on a daily guided tour. The park - part of the European Garden Heritage Network since 2009 - is freely accessible all year round until dark.

Geographical location

Wilhelmsthal Castle is about ten kilometers northwest of the city center of Kassel and about two kilometers south-southeast of the Calden town center. It is located in the valley of the small Esse tributary Jungfernbach at around 260  m above sea level. NN .

history

In 1643 the Hessian Countess Amalie Elisabeth , widow of Wilhelm V , bought the Amelgotzen estate . The estate was originally owned by the Helmarshausen monastery . Under the name Amalienthal, it served her as a modest country residence.

The present palace was built from 1743 to 1761 as a pleasure palace for the Hessian Landgrave Wilhelm VIII .

During the Seven Years War there was a bloody battle at the castle in 1762 . There is still a mass grave of French soldiers in the castle park today. This battle is taken up in the story of the "Tambour von Wilhelmsthal", a teenage drummer of the Braunschweig troops who accidentally triggered the attack instead of the retreat by a wrong drum signal and thus unexpectedly brought about the victory over the French troops.

architecture

The castle was designed by François de Cuvilliés as a loosely joined three-wing complex. It was not until 1756 that Simon Louis du Ry took over the building management. The guard houses upstream come from him. The drafts for the interior fittings go back in part to Johann August Nahl (the elder) . After the sculptor u. a. worked in Sanssouci , he created the precious wall paneling and many stucco work .

Furnishing

Most of the rooms, which were formerly designed in pure Rococo, have remained unchanged. Furniture from French production in particular dominates the furnishings. Charles Cressent , Mathieu Criaerd and Bernard II van Risamburgh were among the cabinet makers who worked . German works by Abraham and David Roentgen are also in the house. Newer furnishings from the late 18th century mostly come from Wilhelmshöhe Palace near Kassel and are partly based on designs by Heinrich Christoph Jussow . A large collection of Asian lacquer furniture is also part of the original inventory of the summer palace.

The collection of the house also includes numerous Chinese and Japanese porcelains from different eras.

The castle is also known for its collection of paintings by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder , including the so-called beauty gallery .

Todays use

The castle now serves as a museum and is looked after by the Hessen Kassel Museum Landscape. The princely living rooms, parts of the servants' area and the large castle kitchen can be visited. The historic palace chapel in the north wing is used as an event location. In the south wing there is a small collection of tin soldiers in memory of the Seven Years War.

Castle Park

Contrary to the usual landscape arrangements, the castle is at the lowest point in the park. The garden was planned as a fan-shaped three-axis system and is itself embedded in a larger landscape composition, which ends in the west and east with a circular linden tree. The central axis was conceived as a water-bearing cascade that led into the castle basin, which was originally framed in strict baroque symmetry. The execution was partially implemented. Because of the Seven Years War, the work came to a halt. Around 1800 the park was developed into a landscape park with loose forest and the basin was adapted to a naturally created pond in the countryside. The cascades were filled in and a gothic lookout tower was built from the stones of the cascades along the central axis .

In an elongated hill on the north axis is the former ice cellar, in which ice was stored in the winter months in order to serve as cold storage in summer. From the initial phase only the grotto , which is the highlight of the southern axis, is preserved today. It was created by the sculptor Peter Laporterie , who richly decorated it with shells and glass. Originally, gold-plated putti were placed across the park . The sculptures, made of lead cladding and rosin wax fillings, suffer from changes in the weather, so that today only the best-preserved ones adorn the balustrade of the grotto. The canal with the water features in front of the grotto as part of the southern axis was only reconstructed after the Second World War . In the eastern extension of the south axis - directly behind the grotto - is the (overgrown) water reservoir of the water features. Further to the east is the duck pond with the duck island made of roughly broken rocks. The duck house built on the duck island in a Chinese-style construction is no longer preserved.

Transport links

The lock is on from the east or Espenau of a nearby, common portion of the main roads 7 and 83 zoom leading national road  to reach the 3217th At the castle park near the Schlosshotel Wilhelmsthal, it bends south as a mostly straight lawn avenue and leads to Kassel to the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe , which includes the Wilhelmshöhe Castle. From the bend, Kreisstraße  46 leads through the castle park in the west, north-northwest to Calden.

Others

The castle was used several times as a backdrop for filming. In 1957 OW Fischer played in Rulers Without a Crown . The television game Winter, which was a summer also used the castle as a backdrop.

On June 16, 1982 a 0.80 DM stamp with the motif Schloss Wilhelmsthal of the Deutsche Bundespost Berlin appeared in the series Castles and Palaces . Both the Deutsche Bundespost and the Deutsche Bundespost Berlin issued 21 values ​​in this series.

literature

  • Friedrich Bleibaum : Wilhelmstal Castle (= The architectural and art monuments in the Cassel administrative district . Vol. VII: Hofgeismar district , 1st part), Kassel 1926 (contains a list of the original inventory aimed at completeness).
  • Wilhelmstal Castle and François de Cuvilliés d. Ä. (= Yearbook of the preservation of monuments in the Kassel administrative region , 2nd special issue). Bernecker, Melsungen 1932.
  • Wolfgang Einsingbach and Franz Xaver Portenlänger: Calden, Castle and Garden Wilhelmsthal. Ed. Administration of the State Palaces and Gardens of Hesse. Bad Homburg 1980.
  • Bernd Modrow and Claudia Gröschel: Princely pleasure, 400 years of garden culture in Hesse. Ed. Administration of the State Palaces and Gardens of Hesse. Bad Homburg and Regensburg 2002, ISBN 3-7954-1487-3 .
  • Fabian Fröhlich: Where the spring rules undisturbed, Wilhelmsthal Castle near Calden. Ed. Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel and Michael Eissenhauer. Monographic series, Volume 21. Kassel 2007, ISBN 978-3-422-02144-0 .
  • Michael Karkosch: "Hidden behind tall beech trees ...", Imperial summer retreat in Wilhelmsthal. In: Worth seeing. Visitor magazine of the administration of the State Palaces and Gardens of Hesse, issue 4. Bad Homburg 2008, p. 39, ISSN  1860-7632 .
  • Rolf Müller (Ed.): Palaces, castles, old walls. Published by the Hessendienst der Staatskanzlei, Wiesbaden 1990, ISBN 3-89214-017-0 , pp. 71–72.
  • Susanne Jacob, Thomas Wiegand: Cultural monuments in Hessen. Werra-Meißner district . II. City of Eschwege. In: State Office for the Preservation of Monuments Hesse (ed.): Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany . Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1992, ISBN 3-528-06241-X , p. 140-145 .

Web links

Commons : Schloss Wilhelmsthal  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Museum landscape Hessen Kassel . In: museum-kassel.de . Archived from the original on April 12, 2015.
  2. Hans Vogts: The Cologne house up to the beginning of the 19th century , Volume II, “Sculptors and carvers witnessed in Cologne from the end of the 14th to the end of the 18th century”, p. 695


Coordinates: 51 ° 23 ′ 35 "  N , 9 ° 24 ′ 56.9"  E