Skokloster Castle | Sweden

Skokloster Castle is located on Lake Mälaren between Stockholm and Uppsala. It was built in the Baroque style between 1654 and 1676 by Carl Gustaf Wrangel after a design by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder. When Wrangel died in 1676, the castle passed into the hands of the Brahe family, and then, after 1930, became the property of the von Essens. In 1967 the castle and its contents were sold by the family to the Swedish government; since then it has been open as a museum.

The castle is a remarkable monument to the Swedish Age of Greatness, a period in the middle decades of the seventeenth century when Sweden became one of the most powerful countries in Europe. Some rooms in the castle are unchanged since the time when the castle was first built. In fact, the death of Wrangel meant that the castle was never truly completed: his large banqueting hall remains in the same condition as the builders left it in the summer of 1676, complete with their tools.

No other building in Europe can display a contained seventeenth-century building site with such authenticity. If this one room appears unfinished, every other part of the castle displays the full, sumptuous splendour of the Baroque. The castle's elegant chambers are home to remarkable collections of paintings, furniture, textiles and silver and glass tableware. The armoury and library are particularly noteworthy, both founded on Wrangel's collections of weapons and books and enriched and enlarged by other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocratic bequests.

Skokloster is rightly considered one of the great castles of Baroque Europe, and the most evocative of the era of Great Power in Sweden. Set in idyllic countryside, it is a testimony to the vision of an ambitious and imaginative Swedish general and a European patron of the arts.

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