Schloss Lustheim

Schloss Lustheim is a compact Baroque hunting and pleasure palace built between 1684 and 1688 for Max Emanuel as a garden retreat at the eastern end of the Schleissheim grounds. The architecture is elegant in the Italian manner, far more intimate than the grand Neues Schloss at the other end of the formal canal. Today it houses the Meissen porcelain collection of the Bavarian National Museum — a superb assembly of pieces from the factory's founding decades in the early 18th century.

The collection ranges from delicate tableware and figurines to large decorative vases, and the quality of painting on the pieces is remarkable. For anyone with an interest in European decorative arts, this is an essential stop. The setting — a small palace surrounded by garden at the end of a long formal water axis — makes arriving here on foot from the Neues Schloss a genuinely pleasurable experience.

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A story
The Meissen collection here — assembled by Ernst Schneider and donated to Bavaria — is one of the great concentrations of early European porcelain. Meissen began producing hard-paste porcelain in 1710, breaking the Chinese monopoly on the secret; the pieces at Lustheim span those first extraordinary decades when European workshops were still discovering what was possible with the new material.