The Hermitage guide

The Hermitage, one of the oldest museums in the Soviet Union, has travelled the long road from a small picture gallery in the palace of the Russian Empress to a major national repository of art treasures and an important research and educational centre. Every year the Hermitage is visited by over three and a half million people.

The Museum occupies five buildings situated on the left bank of the Neva in the central part of Leningrad: the Winter Palace, built in 1762 by Francesco Bartolommeo Rastrelli; the Small Hermitage, designed in 1796 by Vallin de La Mothe; the Big (or Old) Hermitage, designed by Yuri Velten and completed in 1784; and the Hermitage Theatre, erected by Giacomo Quarenghi in the late 1780s and linked to the Big Hermitage by an arch over the Winter Canal. The New Hermitage was built in 1851 from a design by Leo von Klenze to accommodate the steadily growing collections of the Museum.

The Hermitage's foundation date is considered the year 1764, when 225 canvases bought by Catherine II from the German merchant Johann Ernest Gotzkowsky were delivered to the Winter Palace.

Prior to the February 1917 Revolution the Winter Palace was the residence of the royal family, then served as the headquarters of the bourgeois Provisional Government whose members were arrested by the workers during the October Revolution of 1917.

During the Soviet period the Hermitage collections have increased more than fourfold. The Hermitage today is a veritable museum of the history of world culture and art — from the Stone Age to modern times. Its collection of Western European paintings enjoys world fame.

In recent years the Hermitage has acquired works by Bellange, Boudin, Dufy, Matisse, Guttuso, Teniers, Ostade, Friedrich, and Grundig. The collection of Rockwell Kent, the artist's gift to the Soviet people, laid the beginnings of the Section of American Painting. In 1972 the American collector Armand Hammer presented to the Hermitage The Portrait of the Actress Antonia Zarate by Francisco Goya. The Museum continues to receive canvases by contemporary Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, and German artists.

The Hermitage comprises six major departments. Their collections, arranged in 350 rooms, contain over 2,700,000 items.

Boris Piotrovsky,

Academician, Director-General of the Hermitage