Donndorf-Museum

The Donndorf-Museum stands in Weimar, Thuringia, in a single-storey gallery building on Amalienstraße. It was built in 1907 with funds from the city and designed by Bruno Schmidt after earlier plans by Karl Eduard Kurth. The museum had two entrances and was created to house plaster models of sculptures by Adolf von Donndorf.

The collection once numbered 135 models, including figures of Martin Luther, Otto von Bismarck and Friedrich Schiller. Donndorf offered the city all his plaster works on condition they be displayed publicly. The city accepted and set up a room in the Posecksche Haus for the museum. By the late 1990s the collection had been absorbed into the Museum für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Thüringens.

Today the building remains, though most of the plaster sculptures were lost in 1945. A few survive, and in 2016 fourteen were shown in a cabinet exhibition marking the centenary of Donndorf’s death. Outside stands a bronze portrait herme of the sculptor, created in 1910 by his son Karl Donndorf and cast in Dresden.