Czapski Palace & the Chopin Family Drawing Room

Why is it significant?

Walk through the gateway and into the courtyard of the Czapski Palace, and you are among art students carrying portfolios and canvases, because this is the Academy of Fine Arts. Turn toward the side wing on your left. Up on its second floor, the Chopins had their last home in Warsaw.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk through the gateway and into the courtyard of the Czapski Palace, and you are among art students carrying portfolios and canvases, because this is the Academy of Fine Arts. Turn toward the side wing on your left. Up on its second floor, the Chopins had their last home in Warsaw.

The family moved in in 1827, renting a flat in the annex of what was then the palace of the Krasiński family. They came here in grief: Fryderyk's youngest sister, Emilia, had just died of tuberculosis at fourteen. Their new home looked straight onto Krakowskie Przedmieście, the most elegant street in the city, and their drawing room soon became one of its liveliest. Students, poets, musicians and professors crowded in for evenings of music and talk.

It was here, between 1829 and 1830, that a twenty-year-old Chopin wrote his two piano concertos, in F minor and in E minor. He was quietly in love with a young singer from the conservatory, Konstancja Gładkowska, and he confessed in a letter to a friend that she had inspired the slow movement of one of them... while never quite daring to tell her. Both concertos were first played in public in Warsaw in 1830.

Then, on the second of November 1830, he climbed into a carriage and left for Vienna. The story goes that friends pressed a silver cup filled with Polish earth into his hands, and that this soil was scattered on his coffin in Paris nineteen years later. Weeks after he left, the November Uprising broke out, and he never saw Warsaw again.

The palace was gutted in the Second World War, but the drawing room was recreated and opened in 1960, furnished in the style of the period after descriptions from the time and a watercolour of the room painted by a family friend, Antoni Kolberg. Next door, on the same side of the street, stands the church of the Holy Cross, where Chopin's heart is kept. Now cross Krakowskie Przedmieście to the wrought-iron gate of the University of Warsaw, almost directly opposite.