Moments from National Gallery Prague

Founded in 1796 by the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art, it is one of the oldest public art institutions in Central Europe, but unlike most national galleries it has no single home: the collection is deliberately spread across several historic buildings around Prague, each holding a different slice of art history. The Trade Fair Palace (Veletrzni palac), a vast 1920s functionalist building, holds the modern and contemporary collection, including a strong run of French art and Czech avant-garde work that rarely gets its due outside the country. Sternberg Palace covers Old Masters, and the Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia holds medieval art inside an actual thirteenth-century Gothic monastery.

Because the collection is scattered, it helps to pick one building rather than trying to see the "gallery" as a single visit, they're spread across the city and each rewards two or three unhurried hours on its own. The Trade Fair Palace is the one most visitors mean when they say they're going to the National Gallery, and its top floor, largely given over to Czech Cubism, is a genuinely under-visited introduction to a movement most people only associate with Paris. The Convent of St. Agnes is worth the detour for the building alone, one of the few places in Prague where you can see Gothic architecture and medieval altarpieces in the setting they were actually made for.