The Museum is housed in the Old Town Hall, a secular Gothic building whose construction began in the late thirteenth century and lasted until the first half of the sixteenth century. Such buildings are now rare in Europe. The Town Hall's sculpted ornaments, both outside and inside, are decorated for the most part with heraldic symbols of the town and the Dukedom of Wroclaw, and also those of the Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary. The collections of the Museum were previously a part of the Historical Museum, established in 1970. A year later, the Town Hall Division was created, and in 2000 was transformed into the Museum of Burgher Art, a division of the Museum of the City of Wroclaw.
The holdings comprise mostly works by artists associated with Wroclaw, and include painting, sculpture and graphics, as well as crafts and decorative objects made of gold, silver and pewter in the late Gothic, Baroque, eclectic and Art Nouveau styles. One section is devoted to the Town Hall's architecture and Wroclaw's coat of arms.
Among the Museum's most prized possessions is a late seventeenth century ivory sculpture of the Madonna and Child, an example of colonial art from the Philippines or China. The Wroclaw silver section boasts a late-Gothic chalice from the second half of the fifteenth century, a Baroque reliquary made by Georg Nawarra around 1740 and an Art Nouveau trophy cup of Wroclaw's Merchant Shooting Fraternity, dating to 1902, which displays the names of its champions from the years 1901 to 1942. The heraldic section is noted for its mid-sixteenth-century gilded silver Municipal Guards badge, which bears the city's coat of arms. The Museum also collects sculptures of prominent Wroclaw citizens, including its Nobel laureates.
Permanent exhibitions: The Art of Wroclaw's Goldsmiths; Nineteenth-Century Silesian Pewter; Gallery of Prominent Residents of Wroclaw.
Muzeum Sztuki Mieszczańskiej
Oddział Muzeum Miejskiego Wrocławia
Stary Ratusz
Rynek 1
50-106 Wrocław
Region: woj. dolnośląskie
Phone: (+48 71) 347 16 93
WWW: www.mmw.pl
Email: muzeum@mmw.pl