Hermitage Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The State Hermitage Museum holds the largest collection of paintings in the world, and only a small part of it ever hangs on a wall. Its collections run to over three million items, and roughly a third of those are coins and medals. They fill six historic buildings strung along the Palace Embankment in Saint Petersburg, including the Winter Palace, once the home of Russian emperors. In 2022 the museum drew 2,812,913 visitors, enough to place it tenth among the most visited art museums in the world. Yet the institution began as something far more private. The word hermitage means the dwelling of a hermit, someone who lives apart from society. So how did a refuge become one of the most crowded galleries on earth? How did one empress turn 225 paintings into a collection that rivaled the great museums of Western Europe? And why, two centuries later, did the building still hold secrets it would not admit to owning?

• 2. An Empress And Her Refuge

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  Catherine the Great founded the museum's collection in 1764, the same year she acquired paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Gotzkowsky had assembled the works for Frederick II of Prussia, who refused to buy them after losing the Seven Years' War. Conflicting accounts list either 225 or 317 paintings, mainly Flemish and Dutch, among them 90 that were never precisely identified. The original group leaned heavily on a few hands. It held thirteen paintings by Rembrandt, eleven by Rubens, seven by Jacob Jordaens, and five each by Anthony van Dyck and Paolo Veronese. Three came from Frans Hals, including his Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove, painted in 1650. Rembrandt's Danaë, painted in 1636, and his Descent from the Cross, painted in 1624, were part of that first purchase, and they remain in the Hermitage today. The name itself describes the place's first purpose. The Hermitage of the Winter Palace originally meant the tsars' private apartments, a retreat from the obligations of courtly life. Catherine used these rooms to host private salons for an intimate circle of friends. During her reign the Hermitage was not a public museum, and few people were ever allowed to see what it held.

• 3. Building For A Growing Hoard

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  In 1764 Catherine commissioned Yury Felten to add an extension on the east side of the Winter Palace, finished in 1766. It later became the Southern Pavilion of the Small Hermitage. From 1767 to 1769 the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe built the Northern Pavilion on the Neva embankment. Between 1767 and 1775, galleries joined the two, and into them Catherine placed her collections. The hoard kept outgrowing its walls. In her lifetime Catherine acquired 4,000 paintings from the old masters, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, and 16,000 coins and medals, plus a natural history collection that filled two galleries. So in 1771 she ordered Felten to build another major extension, a neoclassical structure completed in 1787 and now called the Old Hermitage. Catherine also gave the name Hermitage to her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787 by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. From 1787 to 1792 Quarenghi raised a wing along the Winter Canal with the Raphael Loggias, replicating the loggia in the Apostolic Palace in Rome designed by Donato Bramante. The public would not be let in for decades. The New Hermitage, the building Nicholas I commissioned for that purpose from the German architect Leo von Klenze, opened on the 5th of February 1852.

• 4. The Hunt For Masterpieces

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  Catherine bought the best collections that the heirs of famous collectors put up for sale. In 1769 she purchased Heinrich von Brühl's collection in Saxony, over 600 paintings along with a vast number of prints and drawings. Three years later she bought Pierre Crozat's paintings in France with the help of Denis Diderot. The acquisitions grew bolder with each decade. In 1779 she took the collection of 198 paintings that once belonged to Robert Walpole in London, then in 1781 a group of 119 paintings from Count Baudouin in Paris. In London in 1787 she acquired the sculptures of Lyde Browne, mostly Ancient Roman marbles, which later became the core of the Classical Antiquities collection. Catherine's favorite things to gather were engraved gems and cameos. She was particularly fond of the Roman deity Minerva, whose traits in classical tradition are military prowess, wisdom, and patronage of the arts. Using the title Catherine the Minerva, she founded new institutions of literature and culture and wrote plays of her own. Her daughter-in-law, the Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna, made her a cameo of Catherine as Minerva, an image that would become a tradition of enlightened patronage in Russia.

• 5. Treasures From Deep Time

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  On the ground floor in the western wing of the Winter Palace sit prehistoric artifacts dating from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age, excavated across Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union and Russian Empire. Among them is a renowned collection from the nomadic tribes of the Altai, drawn from the Pazyryk and Bashadar sites. Two objects from those sites stand out. They are the world's oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet and a well-preserved wooden chariot, both from the 4th to 3rd centuries BC. The Caucasian exhibition holds Urartu artifacts from Armenia and Western Armenia, many excavated at Teishebaini under the supervision of Boris Piotrovsky, a former director of the museum. The classical collection runs from the third millennium to the fifth century BC and beyond. Its highlight is the Tauride Venus, which the latest research treats as an original Hellenistic Greek sculpture rather than the Roman copy it was long thought to be. In the Room of the Great Vase stands the Kolyvan Vase, 2.57 meters high and weighing 19 tonnes, made of jasper in 1843. It was installed before the surrounding walls were even erected.

• 6. Walls Of Old Masters

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  The first floor of the Old Hermitage was designed by Andrei Stakenschneider between 1851 and 1860, and its rooms hold Italian Renaissance works by Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese. Among them are the Benois Madonna and the Madonna Litta, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or his school. The Italian and Spanish galleries deepen on the first floor of the New Hermitage. There, three large skylit halls with red walls show canvases of the 16th to 18th centuries, including Tintoretto, Velázquez, and Murillo. The Dutch and Flemish holdings carry their own weight. The rooms along the southern facade and western wing of the New Hermitage are given entirely to Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque painting of the 17th century, with large collections of Van Dyck, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The later French holdings sit elsewhere in the complex. French Neoclassical, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist art hangs on the fourth floor of the Eastern Wing of the General Staff Building, with works by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Modern art fills the General Staff Building too, including Matisse, Picasso, Malevich, and Kandinsky, and a large room devoted to the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich.

• 7. Survival And Loss

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  On the 15th of June 1985, a man later judged insane attacked Rembrandt's Danaë, throwing sulfuric acid on the canvas and cutting it twice with a knife. Hermitage conservationists completed the restoration by 1997, and the painting now hangs behind armoured glass. The museum's hardest years came earlier, under Soviet rule. In 1928 the government ordered the Hermitage to compile a list of valuable works for export. From 1930 to 1934, over two thousand works were sold clandestinely at auctions abroad or directly to foreign officials and businesspeople. The losses included Raphael's Alba Madonna, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. In 1931 Andrew W. Mellon acquired 21 works from the Hermitage, later donating them to form the core of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. War threatened the rest. With the German invasion in 1941, before the Siege of Leningrad began, two trains carried a large part of the collections to Sverdlovsk. Two bombs and a number of shells struck the museum during the siege. The evacuated works returned in October 1945, and the museum reopened the following month, in November 1945.

• 8. Secrets And Satellites

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  In October 1994 the Hermitage admitted, for the first time, that it had been secretly holding French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings taken from German private collections. The exhibition Hidden Treasures Revealed opened on the 30th of March 1995 in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace and showed 74 of the works to the public for the first time. Among them were 56 paintings from the Otto Krebs collection, along with Degas's Place de la Concorde, Renoir's In the Garden, and Van Gogh's White House at Night. A second hidden work surfaced years later. In December 2004 the museum identified Rubens's Venus Disarming Mars, once in the Rheinsberg Palace near Berlin and apparently looted by Soviet troops from the Königsberg Castle in 1945. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the museum's director since July 1992, said it would be cleaned and displayed. The Hermitage also reached outward. It opened the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas on the 7th of October 2001, and the Hermitage Rooms in London's Somerset House on the 25th of November 2000. The Amsterdam dependency opened in 2009 by President Dmitry Medvedev and Queen Beatrix, then severed ties with Saint Petersburg after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and became the H'ART Museum. One feature stayed put through all of it. A population of cats still lives on the museum grounds and serves as an attraction.