The Museum of Decorative Arts was established in 1867 under the name “Deutsches Gewerbemuseum” (roughly: “German Museum of Crafts and Industry”) with an accompanying educational program. It originally comprised, in addition to a library of works about art and art history, graphic art collections which were intended to serve as models and inspiration for craftspersons and architects. Textbooks and photographs relating to architecture, designs for and examples of decorative painting as interior decoration and on façades, stage sets, as well as textbooks and sample books for script and typography constitute core areas of the ornamental prints collection.
The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague – the most comprehensive applied arts collection in the Czech Republic – possesses, in addition to other holdings such as glass, fashions, furniture, posters or photography, an extensive collection of drawings and graphic arts prints, treatises, and folios of calligraphic specimens, which today represents invaluable source material for art history research.
The collection of ornamental prints at the MAK comprises 17,400 prints dating from the 15th to the early 19th centuries. Important painters and graphic artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Peter Flötner, Cornelis Bos, Jacques Ducerceau or Jean Bérain created graphic art prints, among them numerous ornamental designs. Today, ornamental prints are being reevaluated from a variety of aspects as important research sources for art history, history in general and cultural studies.