Opening hours: Closed Mondays; open Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12-5pm; Wednesdays and Fridays, 9am-2pm; Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, 10am-2pm; The Judaistic Section: Closed Mondays; open Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10am-3pm; Wednesdays and Fridays, 9am-2pm.
Although the Leszno District Museum opened in 1950, it was not until 1961 that it moved into a building of its own, the so-called Pastor's House. This eighteenth century edifice now houses the permanent exhibitions of Historical, Archeological and Ethnographical Sections. Later the Museum acquired the next-door nineteenth century burgher house and installed the Gallery of Painting there. In 1993 the Museum established its Judaistic Section, housed in the pre-funeral house on the old Jewish cemetery. The Judaistic Section has also been given the early seventeenth century building of the Leszno Synagogue.
The richest collection of the Museum's Art Section is that of Polish painting of rural subject-matter. The collection boasts paintings by leading Polish artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably by Jozef Chelmonski, Jacek Malczewski, Julian Falat, Leon Wyczolkowski and Wlodzimierz Tetmajer. There is also a substantial collection of eighteenth century burgher, nobility and royal portraits. After all, it was a Leszno-based family that produced Stanislaw Leszczynski, the king of Poland in the years 1704-1709 and 1735-1736, father-in-law of King Louis XV of France and later a Duke of Lorraine. The Museum boasts Poland's most extensive holdings related to the religious reform movement advanced by the Czech Brothers. Fleeing persecution in their home country, they found refuge in Poland and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were particularly active in Leszno, the centre of Polish Protestantism. With the Leszczynskis as their patrons, they founded a school, a printing shop, and a congregation house. The Museum preserves the Czech Brothers' documents, prints, a collection of coffin portraits from St John's Church (the former congregation house), unique altar coverings (antependia), gold and silver items and well as exhibits connected with the greatest member of the Czech Brothers, Jan Amos Komensky. The Historical Section contains also archive records of Leszczynski and Sulkowski families, the owners of Leszno in the sixteenth through eighteenth and eighteenth century respectively. As a multi-faceted institution, the Museum also collects archeological findings, decorative arts, folk arts and crafts, numismatics and the militaria.
The Judaistic Section contains liturgical and ritual objects, such as Hanukkah lights, Sabbath candlesticks, herbs containers and Torah scrolls. There is a collection of postcards of Jewish subject-matter and a lapidarium grouping more than one hundred tombstones from the local Jewish cemetery, ranging in date from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.
Permanent exhibitions: "The Temple of Sorrow" (coffin plates and portraits); "Gallery of the Polish Portrait from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century"; "Gallery of Polish Rural Painting"; "Jan Amos Komensky and the Czech Brothers"; "Leszno across the Ages"; "Our Ancestors" (archeology); "Folk Culture of the South-Western Wielkopolska"; "Decorative Arts"; "Jews in Wielkopolska" (the Jewish Section).
Muzeum Okręgowe w Lesznie
pl. J. Metziga 17
64-100 Leszno
Region: wielkopolskie
Phone: (+48 65) 529 61 40
Fax: (+48 65) 529 29 86
WWW: www.muzeum.leszno.pl
Email: muzeum@muzeum.leszno.pl