Hermitage Museum

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Hermitage Museum
Established 1764
Location 38 Palace Embankment, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Type Art museum, located in the Winter Palace, once the main residence of the Russian Tsars
Director Mikhail Piotrovsky
Website www.hermitagemuseum.org

The State Hermitage Museum (Russian: Государственный Эрмитаж, Gosudarstvennyj Èrmitaž) 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),[1] 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.[2]

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.

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[edit] Origin

In 1717 Peter the Great visited Versailles, where he was inspired by the Château de Marly that Louis XIV had built as a retreat. Louis had called the Château, his hermitage. Thus, when Peter built his own version of Versailles, Peterhof, he too included a small out building that he called his Hermitage. When the Empress Elizabeth designed Tsarskoe Selo in the 1740s, she included a Baroque dining pavilion, also called Hermitage.[3]

The paintings hang amid opulent interior architecture.
The paintings hang amid opulent interior architecture.

Catherine the Great started her famed art 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 debts so great that he was on the verge of bankruptcy.[4] The collection consisted of 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.[5] 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. As her collection was growing through the 1760s, Catherine commissioned the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to build an extension to the Winter Palace. The building was completed in 1769. In the tradition of Peter the Great and Empress Elizabeth, she called the structure "my hermitage" (today, this extension is known as the "Small Hermitage").[6] 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."

Already her collection was filling the halls—in her lifetime she acquired 4,000 paintings from the old masters, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, 16,000 coins and medals and a natural history collection filling two galleries[7]—so in 1770 she commissioned another major extension. Built in two phases, by Yury Velten, this expansion was known as the Old Hermitage. She also gave the name of the Hermitage to her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787 by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi.[8]

[edit] Expansion in the 19th century

The New Hermitage was built specially to house art collections.
The New Hermitage was built specially to house art collections.

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.[9]

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.

[edit] Expansion in the 20th century

A portrait gallery of the 1812 War heroes.
A portrait gallery of the 1812 War heroes.

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 The Night Café. 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.

[edit] Soviet sales of Hermitage paintings

Main article: Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings

The hard-liners in the Soviet government did not 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 of 1475, 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.

One of the halls in the Hermitage Museum.
One of the halls in the Hermitage Museum.

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.

[edit] 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[10]), 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. [11]

In the recent years there is proposal to open Hermitage Museum's branch in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.

The Hermitage complex as seen from across the Neva River. The New Hermitage and Hermitage Theatre are on the left; the Winter Palace is to the right.
The Hermitage complex as seen from across the Neva River. The New Hermitage and Hermitage Theatre are on the left; the Winter Palace is to the right.

[edit] Hermitage directors

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The Guinness book of world records
  2. ^ The Guinness book of world records
  3. ^ Norman 1997, p. 1–4
  4. ^ Norman 1997, p. 28–29
  5. ^ Frank 2002
  6. ^ Norman 1997, p. 36–37
  7. ^ Norman 1997, p. 23
  8. ^ Norman 1997, p. 37–38
  9. ^ Norman 1997, p. 1
  10. ^ Stockley, Philippa, "Josephine's farewell from the Hermitage", The Evening Standard, October 30, 2007. Retrieved on June 4, 2008.
  11. ^ "Hermitage recovers another piece of stolen art", CBC News, August 4, 2006. Retrieved on June 4, 2008.

[edit] References

  • Frank, Christoph (2002), “Die Gemäldesammlungen Gotzkowsky, Eimbke und Stein: Zur Berliner Sammlungsgeschichte während des Siebenjährigen Krieges.”, in Michael North, Kunstsammeln und Geschmack im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Berlin Verlag Spitz, pp. 117-194, ISBN 3830503121 
  • Norman, Geraldine (1997), The Hermitage; The Biography of a Great Museum, New York: Fromm International, ISBN 0880641908 

[edit] External links

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Coordinates: 59°56′26″N, 30°18′49″E