Schloss Jägerhof

This building is said to have been located in the middle of an animal garden roughly near the present-day palace and to have served as the seat of the electoral forestry administration from 1694.

With the death of Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine in 1716 and the departure of his widow on 10 September 1717, Düsseldorf lost its status as a residential city.

Karl Theodor commissioned his master builder Johann Joseph Couven to plan and realise a more representative Jägerhof in the style of a Lustschloss of the Rococo.

Under the auspices of the electoral governor Johann Ludwig Franz von Goltstein, the older part of the Hofgarten and the Reitallee were converted into public parks in a kind of job creation scheme.

In a letter to his wife, Secretary of State count Pierre Louis Roederer described the city of Düsseldorf, which had been prepared for Napoleon's visit, as a "Little Paris".

The family of the division commander Prince Frederick of Prussia, who resided in the Jägerhof Palace from 1821 onwards, found the rooms too small, and so the old plans by Johann Joseph Couven and Adolph von Vagedes were brought out again and the side wings were added under the construction management of Anton Schnitzler [de].

Since even the palace, which had been extended with side wings, was considered too small and inappropriate as a residence for a member of the Prussian royal family, the state sold it, including the garden at the rear, to the city of Düsseldorf in 1909.

However, the existing lease was unlawfully terminated due to considerable pressure from the NSDAP Gauleiter Friedrich Karl Florian in the Gau Düsseldorf, so that on 30 January 1937 the Gauleitung could be established in the building.

The Bremen-born publisher Anton Kippenberg [de] was head of the Leipzig Insel Verlag during his lifetime and an important Goethe collector.

Goethe himself stayed in 1774 and 1792 not far from Jägerhof Palace in the house of the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, where the artists' association, Malkasten, has had their headquarters, Malkasten-Haus [de], since 1861.

[5] In 1713, Elector Jan Wellem had a hunting lodge, decorated with three gables from the workshop of Gabriël Grupello, built to the north of Jägerhof Palace.