In a small gold-and-white room at the end of Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, thirty-seven women look down from the walls. Most of them are not queens: a shoemaker's daughter, a tailor's daughter, a banker's daughter. Ludwig I of Bavaria commissioned them over twenty years, and the palace's own description of the room calls one of them a Spanish dancer — with the word Spanish in quotation marks.

She was not Spanish. She was Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, born in County Sligo in 1821. London had already worked that out: within a week of her June 1843 debut at Her Majesty's Theatre, men in the stalls who had known her under her married name identified her, and the newspapers printed it. Three years later she reached Munich, and a king who could read English newspapers made her Countess of Landsfeld on his own sixty-first birthday.

Seven months after that he lost his throne. The room itself is a survivor too — the paintings were made for a hall in the Munich Residenz that the Second World War took off the map, and they were carried out here afterwards, onto walls never designed for them.

A palace with nothing to defend, and a lie nobody in Bavaria thought to check.

Watch the documentary version: https://youtu.be/jIZ4vfLNO_I

Full written guide, with every source and visitor information:

https://stonekeepatlas.com/castles/nymphenburg-palace/

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — the quotation marks

2:06 Chapter 1 — A gift in the meadow

3:06 Chapter 2 — The palace that would not stop

4:50 Chapter 3 — Four buildings for doing nothing

7:33 Chapter 4 — The king's thirty-six

9:12 Chapter 5 — The dancer who wasn't

11:37 Chapter 6 — Munich, eighteen forty-six

14:09 Chapter 7 — Five weeks

16:00 Chapter 8 — The room comes to Nymphenburg

17:28 Chapter 9 — Close

KEY SOURCES

• Bavarian Palace Administration — Nymphenburg Palace and Park; Room 15 (Schönheitengalerie), Room 20 (Queen's Bedchamber); the Park Palaces — canonical for chronology, room attributions and the "Spanish" wording

• Bruce Seymour, Lola Montez: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996) — the standard biography; the 1843 London exposure and the 1848 sequence

• Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte / bavarikon — Schönheitengalerie König Ludwigs I., and the Festsaalbau installation photograph (c. 1937)

• Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Königreich Bayern portal, object 898 — Stieler's Lola Montez, 1847, carrying the inscription on the reverse (Residenzmuseum G 406)

• The Morning Post, 12 June 1843, and the London press of that month — her own claim of birth at Seville in 1823, and the reply to it

• Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg — manufactory history (Neudeck 1747; the northern crescent from 1761)

• Full bibliography in the article linked above.

ABOUT THE SHOW

StoneKeep Atlas tells the real stories of Europe's great castles, palaces and fortresses — one definitive episode at a time. New episodes alongside the documentaries at youtube.com/StoneKeepAtlas.

Website: https://stonekeepatlas.com

CREDITS

Music: Envato Elements. Narration produced with synthetic voice.