Everything about Hermitage Museum totally explained
The
State Hermitage Museum in
Saint Petersburg,
Russia is one of the largest museums in the world, with 3 million works of art (not all on display at once), and one of the oldest
art galleries and
museums of
human history and
culture in the world. The vast Hermitage collections are displayed in six buildings, the main one being the
Winter Palace which used to be the official residence of the Russian
Tsars. International branches of The Hermitage Museum are located in
Amsterdam,
London,
Las Vegas and
Ferrara (Italy). The Hermitage holds the Guinness World Record as having the world's largest collection of paintings.
Strong points of the Hermitage
collection of Western
art include
Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci,
Rubens,
van Dyck,
Rembrandt,
Poussin,
Claude Lorrain,
Watteau,
Tiepolo,
Canaletto,
Canova,
Rodin,
Monet,
Pissarro,
Renoir,
Cézanne,
van Gogh,
Gauguin,
Picasso, and
Matisse. There are several more collections, however, including the Russian imperial
regalia, an assortment of
Fabergé jewellery, and the largest existing collection of ancient gold from Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Origin
Catherine the Great started the famed collection in
1764 by purchasing paintings from
Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, after his bankruptcy in the year before. Gotzkowsky provided 317 paintings, including 90 not precisely identified, to the Russian crown, to satisfy his obligations. Flemish and Dutch masters such as
Rembrandt (13 paintings),
Rubens (11 paintings),
Jacob Jordaens (7 paintings),
Antoon van Dyck (5 paintings),
Paolo Veronese (5 paintings),
Frans Hals (3 paintings),
Raphael (2 paintings),
Holbein (2 paintings),
Titian (1 painting),
Jan Steen,
Hendrick Goltzius,
Dirck van Baburen,
Hendrick van Balen and
Gerrit van Honthorst formed the basis and the beginning of the collection in the Hermitage. One of the Rembrandts in the possession of Gotzkowsky was
Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther.
Russian
ambassadors in foreign capitals were commissioned to acquire the best collections offered for sale:
Brühl's collection in
Saxony,
Crozat's in
France and the
Walpole gallery and
Lyde Browne marbles in
England. Catherine called her art gallery
my hermitage, as very few people were allowed within to see its riches. In one of her letters she lamented that "only the mice and I can admire all this." She also gave the name of the Hermitage to
her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787.
Expansion in the 19th century
Gradually, imperial collections were enriched by relics of
Greek and
Scythian culture, unearthed during excavations on
Pereshchepina,
Pazyryk, and other ancient burial mounds in southern Russia. Thus started one of the world's richest collections of ancient
gold, which now includes a substantial part of
Troy's treasures unearthed by
Heinrich Schliemann and seized from
Berlin museums by the
Red Army in
1945.
To house the ever-expanding collection of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian
antiquities,
Nicholas I commissioned the neoclassicist German architect
Leo von Klenze to design a building for the public museum. Probably the first purpose-built art gallery in
Eastern Europe, the New Hermitage was opened to the public in
1852.
As the Czars continued to amass their art holdings, several works of
Leonardo da Vinci,
Jan van Eyck, and
Raphael were bought in
Italy. The Hermitage collection of Rembrandts was considered the largest in the world.
Expansion in the 20th century
The imperial Hermitage was proclaimed property of the Soviet state after the
Revolution of 1917. The range of its exhibits was further expanded when private art collections from several
palaces of the
Russian Tsars and numerous private mansions were being
nationalized and then redistributed among major Soviet state museums. Particularly notable was the influx of old masters from the
Catherine Palace, the
Alexander Palace, the
Stroganov palace and the
Yusupov Palace as well as from other palaces of Saint Petersburg and suburbs. Later Hermitage received modern art from private collections of
Sergei Shchukin and
Ivan Morozov which were nationalized by the Soviet state. New acquisitions included most of
Gauguin's later oeuvre, 40
Cubistic works by
Picasso, and such icons of modern art as
Matisse's
La danse and
Vincent van Gogh's
Night Cafe. After WWII the Hermitage received about 40 canvases by Henri Matisse as a gift from the artist to the museum. Other internationally known artists also gave their works to the Hermitage.
The hard-liners in the
Soviet government didn't pay much attention to maintenance of art, which was officially labeled as "
bourgeois and decadent" art. During the 1920s and 1930s, under the rule of
Stalin, the Soviet government ordered the sale of over two thousand works of art, including some of the most precious works from the Hermitage collection. These included priceless masterpieces like
Raphael's
Alba Madonna,
Titian's
Venus with a Mirror,
Botticelli's
Adoration of the Magi, and Jan van Eyck's
Annunciation among other world known masterpieces by
Rembrandt,
Van Dyck. In 1931, after a series of negotiations, 22 works of art from the Hermitage were acquired by
Andrew W. Mellon, who later donated most of these works to form a nucleus of the
National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C.. (See also
Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings.) There were other losses, though works of their kind are more abundant: thousands of works were moved from the Hermitage collection to the
Pushkin Museum in
Moscow and other museums across the USSR. Some pieces of the old collection were also lost to enemy looting and shelling during the
Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, when the Hermitage building was marked as one of the prime targets of the
Nazi air-raids and artillery, albeit it was more or less successfully defended by the surviving citizens of
Leningrad.
This period in Hermitage's history came to an end in
1945. At that time the government attempted to compensate recent losses by transferring to the museum some of the art captured by the
Red Army in
Germany during
World War II. The most highly priced part of the booty were 74
Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist paintings taken from private collections of German business elite. These paintings were considered lost until
1995 when the museum unveiled them to the public as "Hidden treasures" revealed. The Russian government maintains that these works provide just a small compensation for irreparable losses inflicted on Russian cultural heritage by the German invasion in WWII, including the almost complete destruction and looting of Tsar's palaces in
Peterhof,
Oranienbaum,
Pavlovsk,
Gatchina, and
Tsarskoe Selo, as well as other cities and towns under the Nazi occupation. Moreover, the State
Duma passed a law forbidding return of disputed works to their owners in case they were guilty of financing the
Nazi regime.
In the 21st century
In recent years, Hermitage expanded to the nearby buildings of the
General Staff and launched several ambitious projects abroad, including the
Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in
Las Vegas, the Hermitage Rooms in
London's
Somerset House (which closed permanently in November 2007 due to poor visitor numbers), and the
Hermitage Amsterdam in the former
Amstelhof,
Amsterdam.
The Hermitage and much of its collection were featured in the 24-hour long Japanese documentary film, the largest film ever about the Hermitage, made in the 1990s. The
Winter Palace and other buildings of the Hermitage and its interiors were filmed in several Soviet documentaries and educational films, as well as in numerous feature films, such as the
James Bond film
Golden Eye,
Anna Karenina, and other movies. The most recent movie made in the Hermitage was
Russian Ark, a single-shot walkthrough with period re-enactments by actors in period-style costumes, spanning three hundred years of court meetings, balls and family life in the
Winter Palace.
In July 2006, the museum announced that 221 minor items, including jewelry, Orthodox icons, silverware and richly enameled objects, had been stolen. The value of the stolen items was estimated to be approximately $543,000; by the end of 2006 some of the stolen items were recovered.
In the recent years there's proposal to open Hermitage Museum's
branch in Vilnius, capital of
Lithuania.
Hermitage directors
Further Information
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