The State Hermitage

The Hermitage is one of the largest museums in the world with collections of three million works of art and other items. In the world only the Louvre is larger than the Hermitage.

The museum has 6 departments which reflect the breadth and depth of its collections. They are:

1. Art and Culture of Classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt
2. Oriental Art and Culture
3. Prehistoric Art and Culture
4. Russian Culture
5. Western European Art
6. Numismatics

Undoubtedly, however, the Hermitage museum is best known among the general public for its picture gallery.

The State Hermitage Museum consists of 5 buildings that are joined by hanging corridors. They are the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and also, behind the Winter Canal, the Hermitage Theatre by Giacomo Quarenghi (1783-1787).

The Winter Palace was built in 1754-1762 by Francesco Bartalomeo Rastrelli. The green and white 3-storey palace is a marvel of the Baroque Style. From 1762 untill 1917 (for over 150 years) the Winter Palace was the residence of Russian emperors. The interiors of the palace were remade many times. In 1837 a sudden fire destroyed most of the interiors. The restoration works went on for 2 years under the direction of Vasily Stasov and Alexander Briullov. From the outside the palace was returned to its original appearance but most of the interiors were redisigned in the late Classical style.

The Small Hermitage was built in 1764 - 1775 according to a desing by Jean Baptist Vallin de la Mothe. This was the first building to be known as a Hermitage, which in French means a solitary place where a hermit lives. It consists of only 2 galleries, the southern and the northern, joined by the Hanging Garden. In 1771-1787 the Old Hermitage by Yuri Felten was added and later in the times of Nicholas I, between 1842 and 1851 the New Hermitage designed by Leo von Klenze was built especially to house the growing museum collection. The main entrance of the New Hermitage is decorated with 10 atlantes.

The story of the Hermitage collection begins with the purchase of 225 Dutch and Flemish paintings. Catherine II bought them in 1764 from the Berlin merchant Gotzkowsky. Then Catherine II went on buying not only whole collections of paintings but also sketches, carvings, sculptures, objects of applied art and books (including Voltaire's library). Her grandson, Alexander I, followed her purchasing the private collection of Napoleon's wife Josephine de Beauharnais, the collection of the Spanish minister Manuel de Godoy and others. Later individual acquisitions became the rule until 1917, after which whole collections, newly nationalized, again came into the museum.

There have been two dark periods in the museum history. The first came in the middle of the nineteenth century when Tsar Nicholas I decided that a large group of works were not good enough to keep and put them up for sale, with the resultant loss of several important paintings. The second difficult time was during the establishment of Soviet power when a number of masterpieces were sold to foreign collectors in an attempt to fill the empty coffers of the state.

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