Hermitage is pronounced with a French accent in Russia. It loses its ‘H’ and the stress falls on the last syllable. It should be spelt ‘Ermitazh’, if one follows the standard rules for converting Russian Cyrillic script into our own. It is one of the many French words that entered the Russian language during the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), the crude, seven-foot genius who built St Petersburg and forced his people to shift their mental orientation from East to West.

Both Peter and Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–96) prided themselves on introducing French culture and habits into their country. As a result, Russia’s premier museum takes its name from an aspect of country living which became popular in France in the seventeenth century and turned into a pan-European landscape gardening fashion in the eighteenth. A hermitage, with or without a hermit, sometimes in ruins and sometimes intact, was a required feature of a fashionably landscaped park of the Romantic era. When Peter began to build his great country palace of Peterhof, a seaside imitation of Versailles complete with fountains and garden pavilions, he naturally included a hermitage — the first Russian Hermitage. It was a two-storey building with an upstairs dining room lined, edge to edge, with Dutch seventeenth-century paintings and Peter used it for private parties.

So when Catherine built a pavilion on to her Winter Palace in St Petersburg, as a private place where she could entertain her friends without ceremony and hang her pictures, she called it her Hermitage. And the name stuck. Her original pavilion is now known as the Small Hermitage and a second extension she built to accommodate her overflowing art collection is known as the Old Hermitage. The theatre she later tacked on to them is known as the Hermitage Theatre. When a museum was built on to the palace complex in the nineteenth century, it was dubbed the New Hermitage. Since 1917 the collections have gradually spread to fill all the former palace buildings and the whole, magnificent complex is now known as the State Hermitage Museum.

As with their other borrowings from European culture, the Russian idea of a hermitage differed considerably from the models that inspired it. The first hermitages had been constructed in Italy during the Renaissance by princes with a genuine desire to mix piety with pleasure on their country estates. Buen Retiro in Madrid, built between 1636 and 1639, was the first royal palace to have custom-built hermitages, with chapels and fountains, in its park – the Spaniards saw no contradiction in serving God and Mammon simultaneously. From Spain the fashion spread to France but with a shift in emphasis. In the late seventeenth century Louis XIV built the Château de Marly as a place of retreat, where he could escape the rigid etiquette he had instituted at Versailles, and called it his Hermitage.

According to the Due de Saint Simon, whose memoirs paint a vivid picture of life at the French court, the king ‘sickened with beauty and tired at last with the swarm of courtiers, persuaded himself that from time to time he needed a small place and solitude … so the Hermitage was built. The plan was to spend there three nights only, from a weekday to a Saturday, two or three times a year, with a dozen or so courtiers for necessary attendance. But what actually happened was that the Hermitage was enlarged, building after building sprang up, hills were removed, waterworks and gardens were put in.’

This was where the Russian idea of a hermitage came from. Peter the Great visited Versailles and Marly in 1717, shortly after Louis XIV’s death, and was delighted with them. He saw a hermitage as a place where you could entertain your friends without fuss or ceremony. The Hermitage that he built at Peterhof was a small, moated, two-storey building with a system of pulleys which allowed the dining table on the first floor to be supplied from below, thus making the presence of servants unnecessary during his carousals.

When Peter’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, was laying out the park of her own great country palace, Tsarskoe Selo, in the 1740s, she naturally included a hermitage, this time a Baroque dining pavilion with another mechanical table. Elizabeth Dimsdale, the wife of a British doctor, has left an account of how it worked. There were ‘four dumb waiter plates with silver rims and something of the slate kind in the middle of them and a pencil fixed to each plate. You wrote on the plate what was ordered, then pulled another string and the plate sunk down and returned again with the order, dishes the same.’

This was the kind of hermitage that Catherine had in mind when she commissioned the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to add a small pavilion to the majestic Winter Palace she had inherited from the Empress Elizabeth. The buildings were connected by a covered bridge and both look out over the broad waters of the River Neva just before it splits in two to flow either side of Vasilevsky Island.

The Empress Elizabeth had referred to the rooms in her palace that she used for private entertainment as her ‘Hermitage’. Catherine was thus following her lead when she added a hermitage pavilion to the palace – but it was still connected in her mind with a garden. Her original idea was to have a first-floor ‘hanging garden’ built over her stables. At one end, which connected directly with her private apartments, there were to be rooms for her lover, Count Grigory Orlov. At the other, there would be the hermitage proper, a suite of rooms looking out over the river which she would use for entertaining her friends. There was also a conservatory which opened on to the hanging garden, which she kept bustling with songbirds. Before the building was completed, Catherine had begun collecting paintings on a massive scale, so she had picture galleries added down the sides of the garden.

The galleries quickly proved inadequate for her collection – she bought 2,000 pictures in the first ten years of her reign. So she had the German-trained architect, Yury Velten, build her a second, larger extension to the palace. As well as galleries, it contained a library, a medal cabinet and a billiard room – Catherine was very fond of billiards. It was tacked on beyond Vallin de la Mothe’s small pavilion and the two buildings came to be known as the ‘Small Hermitage’ and the ‘Old Hermitage’.

Like its namesakes in the parks of Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine’s Small Hermitage had tables volants – dinner tables which could be mechanically raised or lowered from the ground floor by a system of pulleys. ‘In the dining-rooms, there are two tables side by side laid for ten,’ the German writer Friedrich Melchior Grimm explained in a letter to society hostess Madame Geoffrin in 1774. ‘Waiting is done by machine. There is no need for footmen behind chairs, and the Provost of Police is distinctly at a disadvantage as he is unable to report to Her Majesty anything that is said at these dinners.’

Catherine regarded her Hermitage as a sort of private club, whose members she personally selected, and as a place where she could forget her rank and relax. She particularly enjoyed small dinners for a dozen or so people and would often carry off her guests to watch a play in her private theatre afterwards. She held soirees known as Petits Hermitages for sixty or eighty people several times a month and, more rarely, Grands Hermitages to which she invited up to 200 guests, providing them with dinner and a ball.

To ensure that everyone behaved properly in the intimacy of her Hermitage, she drew up a set of rules which she had mounted on the wall:

1 All ranks shall be left behind at the doors, as well as swords and hats.

2 Parochialism and ambitions shall also be left behind at the doors.

3 One shall be joyful but shall not try to damage, break or gnaw at anything.

3 One shall sit or stand as one pleases.

4 One shall speak with moderation and quietly so that others do not get a headache.

5 One shall not argue angrily or passionately.

6 One shall not sigh or yawn.

7 One shall not interfere with any entertainment suggested by others.

8 One shall eat with pleasure, but drink with moderation so that each can leave the room unassisted.

9 One shall not wash dirty linen in public and shall mind one’s own business until one leaves.

That Catherine needed to ban drunken brawls at her soirees underlines how superficial the French polish adopted by the Russian court remained at this period. It was only a matter of fifty years since Peter the Great had visited London, Paris and Vienna and brought home with him the vision of how a European court should look and behave – a vision that he proceeded to impose on Russia. He forced his nobles, the boyars to abandon the long fur robes they had worn for centuries and adopt European dress. He cut their flowing beards with his own hands, ignoring pleas for mercy; the Russians believed that their beards, so similar to those worn by the Apostles in icon paintings, were passports to heaven and several carried the severed relics in their pockets after Peter’s scissors had put their salvation at risk.

Above all, it was Peter who moved the Russian capital from Moscow to St Petersburg, in the far north, where he built a new, European-style city on the marshy delta of the River Neva. He wanted it to look like Amsterdam but since he and his successors used mainly Italian architects, it ended up looking more like Venice.

Peter was also an art collector and founded Russia’s first public museum, the so-called Kunstkammer, whose elegant Baroque building can still be admired from the windows of the Hermitage, a little downriver, on the banks of Vasilevsky Island. While the treasures of the Hermitage include imperial acquisitions dating back as far as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1547–84), its first great works of art were acquired by Peter. It is with him, rather than Catherine, that the history of the Hermitage museum really begins.

Peter’s posthumous fame rests almost equally on cruelty and culture. He tortured his eldest son Alexey to death in an effort to obtain evidence of a non-existent plot against him, and executed his subjects on a lavish scale, but he also succeeded in introducing the most up-to-date developments of European science, engineering and art to Russia. He was a passionate ‘improver’ of his people.

Peter became co-tsar at the age of ten in 1682, in partnership with his half-brother Ivan V who was to die in 1696. Ivan’s sister Sophia became Regent and Peter was banished from the court, growing up with little education. He loved to play games of war, constantly ordering arms for the use of his young playmates and, more significantly from the point of view of St Petersburg, which was to be Russia’s first significant sea port, he developed a passion for boats and boatbuilding.

At first Peter learned what he could about boats from knowledgeable locals and the inhabitants of the foreign quarter of Moscow – in old Muscovy foreigners lived apart from the rest of the population. Then he sent agents abroad to study the techniques of seafaring nations. Finally, he went abroad to learn for himself. In 1697–8, he embarked on his first foreign journey, known as the ‘Great Embassy’, travelling ‘incognito’ with a retinue of 250. No one was taken in by his disguise but it enabled him to avoid pomp and formality, which he disliked. He spent several weeks living with a Dutch blacksmith-turned-fisherman in Zaandam, working as a carpenter in the dockyard there.

Firm in the knowledge of his limitless power, Peter liked to play the humble citizen. In Zaandam he lived in two rooms with a stove and a mattress that could be packed away in a cupboard. The rooms have been preserved as a sort of Petrine shrine, which has been visited over the centuries by a succession of tsars. From Holland, Peter moved on to Britain to investigate the naval shipyards of Greenwich, where another of his characteristics became apparent. Here, he was lent the diarist John Evelyn’s house but devoted so much time to hard drinking with his companions that the house and garden were virtually destroyed – floors and furniture were used as firewood, trees were cut down and bushes were uprooted. After his departure, Sir Christopher Wren had to be sent down to Greenwich to rebuild the house.

On his return to Russia, Peter built two navies, one to attack the Turks in the south and the other to attack the Swedes in the north, but he built them on rivers since, at the time, Russia’s only access to the sea was its Arctic coast, where the water was frozen for most of the year. It was thus of enormous significance to Peter when, in 1703, he defeated the Swedish army and captured a stretch of coast on the Gulf of Finland. He immediately ordained the construction of a fortress on the mouth of the Neva to protect the territory from Swedish reprisals, and this became the very first building of St Petersburg, the so-called Peter and Paul fortress.

Peter’s absolute power as autocrat enabled him to draft 20,000 men to work on its construction. According to an account given by the Hanoverian ambassador, Friedrich Christian Weber, some of them came ‘Journies of 200 to 300 German miles’. There were neither sufficient provisions to furnish them with the necessary Tools, as Pickaxes, Spades, Shovels, Wheelbarrows, Planks and the like, they even had not so much as Houses or Huts; notwithstanding which the Work went on with such Expedition, that it was surprising to see the Fortress raised within less than five Months time.’

Peter’s contemporaries considered it crazy to build a city in the far north of the country in harsh climatic conditions. Its inhabitants had to contend with snow and ice for five months a year, then floods, and finally hot summers when the steaming marshes spread disease. Nevertheless, by 1704 Peter was referring to the new settlement as his ‘capital’. And his spectacular defeat of the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709 confirmed his determination to make it the first city of the empire.

He built himself a log and mud cabin on the north bank of the Neva where he lived while directing the construction of the city. His principal architect, Domenico Trezzini, came from Switzerland but had studied architecture in Rome; he arrived in Russia in 1705 and drew up overall plans for the city as well as designing its principal buildings. The government was moved from Moscow in 1712 and Peter populated his city by decree. In 1710 he demanded that 40,000 workmen a year should be sent from the provinces with their tools. All nobles owning more than thirty families of serfs were required to settle in St Petersburg and build houses there. Those who owned more than 500 serfs had to build stone houses of at least two storeys. In order to secure enough stonemasons, he issued an embargo on the construction of stone buildings elsewhere in the country.

Weber has left a classic account in his The Present State of Russia, published in 1723, of how the diplomatic corps was drafted into clearing woodland in 1715. It provides a glimpse of the Petrine life-style:

His Majesty, who was restrained in his own drinking, gave us a well matured Hungarian wine at dinner. We could hardly stand, having drunk such a quantity already, but it was impossible to refuse another pint glass offered by the Tsarina herself. This reduced us to such pitiful circumstances that our servants chose to throw one of us into the garden, and another in the wood where we stayed till four p.m. in the afternoon, and where we were sick. We were woken up at four p.m. and we went back into the Palace where the Tsar gave us each an axe and ordered us to follow him. He took us into a wood, planted with young trees.

Wanting to reach the sea, he had marked out a cutting and immediately started cutting wood down alongside us. Hardly able to cope with this type of work, especially after a debauch which had made us very tired, the seven of us, not counting His Majesty, finished off the alley in three hours. This violent exercise sweated us out of our alcoholic haze. No accident happened except that Mr—, one of His Majesty’s Ministers, lurching hither and thither, was knocked over by a tree which fell on him.

Having thanked us for our work, His Majesty paid for our supper that night. A second debauch followed; this time we fainted away and were put to bed. After one hour’s sleep, one of the Tsar’s favourites woke us up to visit the Prince of Circassia, in bed with his wife. We had to drink brandy and wine by his bed till four o’clock when we found ourselves at home, ignorant of how we got there. At eight a.m., we went to Court to drink coffee but the cups were full of brandy.’

Peter was dedicated to hard drinking and considered it necessary to offer visitors a choice of vodka, Hungarian wine or coffee when he opened Russia’s first museum, the so-called Kunstkammer. His henchman, Alexander Menshikov, the first governor of St Petersburg, objected but Peter insisted that making alcohol available was vital in order to attract attendance. Neither his theatres nor his museum were immediately popular with the boyars who had reluctantly settled in St Petersburg.

Many exhibits from Peter’s Kunstkammer have ended up in the Hermitage, but art was not its main focus. As the German term Kunstkammer implies, it was a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ of the kind accumulated by both scholars and monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a combination of found objects, such as shells and minerals, scientific specimens, curiously wrought craft works, jewels and paintings. Peter was inspired by the cabinets he saw in Holland and Germany on his Great Embassy in the 1690s; he spent three days in detailed study of the Elector of Saxony’s Kunstkammer in June 1698. His first purchases are recorded in the Embassy accounts: ‘Bought at Amsterdam from the merchant Bartholomew Vorhagen, a marine animal, a “Korkodil”, also a sea fish called Swertfish, for his Highness the Tsar’s personal household, and the animal and the fish have been handed to bombardier Ivan Hummer for taking to Moscow.’

Peter was less interested in painting but he admired the meticulously rendered sea pictures of Ludolf Bakhuizen, sat for his portrait to Godfrey Kneller in The Hague – at the request of William III of Holland – and learned engraving from Adriaan Schoonebeek in Amsterdam. It was on the Great Embassy that he first met Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician, whom he later described as his ‘intimate adviser’. In 1708 Leibniz wrote Peter a memorandum on his museum plans: ‘Concerning the Museum, and the cabinets and Kunstkammern pertaining to it, it is absolutely essential that they should be such as to serve not only as objects of general curiosity, but also as means to the perfection of the arts and sciences.’ His advice perfectly accorded with Peter’s desire to ‘improve’ his subjects.

The Kunstkammer was first housed in a garden pavilion beside the small Summer Palace that Domenico Trezzini built for Peter about a mile up the Neva from the Winter Palace. The palace survives to this day, a modest Dutch-style home with gardens stretching along the banks of the Neva and Fontanka rivers. Besides the Kunstkammer pavilion, which has now vanished, the gardens were ‘peopled’ with more than one hundred sculptures imported from Rome and Venice, including recently excavated antique pieces. Among them was one of the Hermitage’s most treasured possessions, the The Tauride Venus, now considered to be a Greek statue of the third to second century BC.

The life-size marble lady has no arms but is otherwise remarkably complete, with a sensitively carved face and sensuous body. She was unearthed in Rome in 1718 and bought secretly on Peter’s behalf by Yury Kologrivov who was in Rome in charge of a group of young painters. However, the civil governor of Rome forbade its export. Kologrivov appealed to the vice-chancellor of the Vatican, Cardinal Ottoboni, for help and a deal was finally struck whereby the Pope donated the Venus to Peter while he, in return, undertook to try to obtain the relics of the fourteenth-century nun, St Bridget, from Sweden. They were kept in the town of Vadsten a good way from the frontier and it is unclear whether Peter intended to obtain them through diplomacy or conquest. In any case, they were never delivered. However, a series of letters from Cardinal Ottoboni to Peter and others in authority in St Petersburg bear witness to the fact that the Vatican expected to receive them. The Venus travelled to St Petersburg overland in a specially sprung coach ordered by the tsar himself. She was number one on the list of treasures that were removed for safekeeping to the Urals at the outbreak of World War II.

Peter’s museum collection, as opposed to his private Kunstkammer, was first opened to the public in 1719 in the Kikin Mansion, which had conveniently become available after the arrest and execution of its owner. Alexander Kikin was an early friend of Peter’s, accompanied him on the Great Embassy in the 1690s, learned shipbuilding in Holland and was given charge of the Admiralty in St Petersburg. But he befriended Peter’s estranged son Alexey and they were both tortured to death in 1718 for allegedly plotting to overthrow the tsar. The ceremonial opening of the museum in Kikin’s elegant Baroque manor house which also survives, now in central St Petersburg – took place in 1719.

By this time Peter had commissioned the museum building on the bank of Vasilevsky Island, which is today known as the Kunstkammer, a blue and white confection centred by a four-tier, polygonal tower that doubles as a skylight. Peter was particularly proud of his skill in pulling teeth and intended to give demonstrations in the well of the tower; the public would be able to watch from a balcony. His dental equipment is today on display at the Hermitage, among a collection of his other tools, while some of the teeth he drew are on show at the Kunstkammer with labels that identify whose they were – ‘a person who made tablecloths’, for example, or ‘a fast-walking messenger’.

The museum building was not completed by the time Peter died in 1725. Both his private collection and the museum collection from the Kikin Mansion were combined there in 1734 and an inventory compiled in 1741 reveals the original character of its exhibits. The scientific section included anatomical specimens, embryos, freaks, animals, plants and minerals; in the ‘man-made’ section there were craftsmen’s tools, an ethnographic collection and a large display of ‘wares from China’; there was a section containing gold, silver, gems and coins and another with ‘pictures in colours thinned with oil’ which was subdivided into representations of faces, representations of single figures, groups, symbolic paintings, landscapes and still lives.

An entirely original feature of Peter’s Kunstkammer was the presence of live exhibits, such as a young hermaphrodite, who later escaped, and Foma, the son of a peasant from Irkutsk who was born with only two digits on each hand and foot. After Foma’s death, Peter had him stuffed and exhibited in the Kunstkammer next to the skeleton of another of his old associates, a French giant called Nicholas Bourgeois. Like earlier monarchs, Peter kept dwarfs and giants at his court to entertain him.

After Peter’s death, a new gallery was added to the museum which contained a wax figure of Peter himself, made by Carlo Rastrelli, the leading court sculptor, together with the stuffed skins of Peter’s dog and his horse Lisetta, ‘a stallion of Persian stock’. Carlo Rastrelli, father of the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli who built the Winter Palace, had been recruited in Paris. On Louis XIV’s death, Peter realised that many artists would be out of work in the French capital and instructed his envoy to try to recruit the best of them into his service. He thus obtained the services of Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, the French architect and garden designer, and Carlo Rastrelli – both were required to sign contracts stating that they would teach their craft to Russian pupils ‘without any secrets or deceptions’.

In addition to bronzes – including a magnificent bust of Peter now in the Hermitage – Rastrelli had made Peter waxworks of several members of the court in the style now mainly associated with Madame Tussaud of London. The waxwork he made of the tsar after his death has become one of the most famous images of Peter in Russia, along with Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue, the Bronze Horseman, later commissioned by Catherine.

In the eighteenth century, portraits were always expected to flatter, and often imbued the sitter with some allegorical significance – Peace, Victory, Freedom or something of the kind. However, a waxwork was expected merely to be lifelike. Rastrelli’s wax figure of Peter has a direct realism, quite untypical of the period, which still speaks powerfully of the subject’s character. It is now the centrepiece of a special exhibition illustrating the age of Peter the Great in the basement of the Hermitage Theatre building – where the remains of Peter’s original, much smaller, Winter Palace were recently excavated.

Peter’s own museum, the Kunstkammer building on Vasilevsky Island, today contains only a few minor leftovers of the original exhibits, which have been gradually dispersed over the centuries. Most popular with tourists are the remains of his collection of anatomical freaks. Having studied the collection of the professor of anatomy Frederik Ruysch in Amsterdam, which he subsequently purchased, Peter issued a decree that ‘human monsters’, unknown animals and birds found anywhere in the country should be saved for him. Dead specimens had to be preserved in vinegar or vodka, which were reimbursed by the imperial pharmacy on delivery of the exhibits. The collection still includes Siamese twins, a two-faced baby and a two-headed calf.

Another of Peter’s decrees brought in a collection which is now one of the glories of the Hermitage, comprising gold buckles and ornaments in the Scytho-Siberian animal style made around the seventh to the third century BC. Peter’s attention was first drawn to these artefacts when Akinfy Demidov, who had mined for precious metal in Siberia, presented twenty marvellous golden objects to his wife Catherine to celebrate the birth of an heir in 1715. Peter was fascinated by the imaginative animal figures, which include eagles with ears, lion-griffins, eagle-griffins, wild cats with manes, tails and griffin’s heads and other exotica. He gave Prince Matvey Gagarin, the governor of Siberia, strict instructions that all the antiquities found in local burial mounds should be collected and sent to St Petersburg. The following year, Gagarin was able to send Peter another one hundred pieces and the collection continued to increase steadily.

The gold objects had mainly been found by tomb robbers who made a professional, or part-time, living from the tall burial mounds left behind by the Scythians, Sauromatae, Sakae and other ancient inhabitants of the Eurasian steppes. Prior to Peter’s decree, the gold objects, once looted, would have been melted and resold as bullion, their artistry lost forever. Peter is thus largely responsible for our knowledge of the extraordinary aesthetic achievements of craftsmen in this remote period. Luckily, he had picked up an interest in archaeology on his European travels.

A miscellany of other leftovers of Peter’s Kunstkammer have found their way to the Hermitage. These include architectural drawings for the early buildings of St Petersburg, scientific instruments, commemorative medals, pottery, textiles and furniture. The contents of his turning shop are particularly interesting since they cast an unusual sidelight both on the monarch and his age. Ingenious machines, known as lathes, capable of imparting barley sugar twists and other geometric mouldings to wood or ivory, as well as accurately copying relief carvings, became popular with European monarchs in the seventeenth century and many, including Maximilian of Bavaria, the Medici Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Florence and Louis XV of France, turned their hands to lathework. It was one of Peter’s favourite hobbies, satisfying simultaneously his artistic sensibility and his fascination with technology.

The turning shop was run by one Andrey Nartov, a Russian craftsman and inventor who worked ‘to devise new and as yet unknown applications for turning skills’, according to a contemporary. Peter gave one of his lathes to Louis XV but the Hermitage still has twelve of the machines Nartov invented, together with articles that Peter made with them from bone, ivory and wood: drinking cups, snuffboxes, candlesticks, sundials, a compass, portrait medallions and an amazingly elaborate ivory chandelier.

Peter’s Kunstkammer does not appear to have housed much in the way of paintings, though some 150 were recorded in the 1741 inventory. Most of his picture collection, which ran to over 400 works by the time of his death, was housed at Peterhof, his country palace on the Gulf of Finland. Early inventories leave some doubts over which imperial purchases Peter was responsible for but it is clear that he preferred Dutch pictures and that he bought most of them during, or after, his second foreign trip in 1716–17.

After spending a month and a half in Paris in 1717, he is known to have returned to Russia with works by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Jean-Marc Nattier, Nicolas de Largillière and Hyacinthe Rigaud. Peter’s agent in Holland bought Rembrandt’s David and Jonathan, a touching scene of the two friends parting, painted in 1642, at the Amsterdam sale of Jan van Beuningen’s collection in 1716. Other notable works by Jan Steen, Simon de Vlieger and Adriaen Van Ostade, which are now in the Hermitage collection, are thought to have belonged to Peter.

Peter’s death brought to a close the first era which had a significant impact on the Hermitage collections. Between his reign and that of Catherine the Great, such notable objects as found their way into the collection did so more or less by mistake – they were either very grand examples of the applied arts purchased for daily use or gifts from foreign potentates.

At this time in Russian history, either a tsar named his heir or the nobles elected a successor from among the previous tsar’s close relations. Peter had left no instructions and was succeeded by his second wife, Catherine, who was popular with his friends. Born Martha Skavronskaya, the daughter of a Lithuanian peasant, she was left an orphan at an early age and became a camp follower of the Russian army in 1702, progressing from bed to bed – she was exceptionally beautiful – until she became the mistress of Peter’s favourite, Prince Alexander Menshikov. Peter first saw her in 1703, pouring wine for the guests at Menshikov’s table.

They were soon lovers and Peter married her secretly in 1708, then publicly in 1712 with their two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, as bridesmaids. Catherine also bore him several sons but all of them were sickly and died young. Her reign lasted only two years. Worn out by hard drinking, the birth of ten children and venereal disease which she had caught from Peter, she died in 1727. Menshikov’s ascendancy died with her. In 1728 he was found guilty of treason, stripped of his possessions and exiled.

The nobles’ selection then fell on Peter’s eleven-year-old grandson by his first marriage, who ascended the throne as Peter II. He was the only child of Alexey, the son Peter I had tortured to death in 1718. The little boy was keen on hunting and moved the court back from St Petersburg to Moscow where he thought the sport was better. However, he only lasted for three years, unexpectedly dying of smallpox in 1730.

The next choice was more enduring. Anna Ivanovna was the daughter of Peter the Great’s half brother Ivan. Anna had been married at seventeen to the Duke of Courland in order to add this little Baltic province to Russia’s sphere of influence. Her nineteen-year-old husband drank so much at the celebrations that he died on the journey home and Anna remained an impecunious dependant of the imperial household until finding herself empress at the age of thirty-seven. Her ten-year reign (1730–40) is considered one of the darker pages of Russia’s history.

She reigned by fear, relying on the secret police and their torture chamber to impose her will. She was also noted for her cruel practical jokes, the most famous being the enforced marriage of Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Golitsyn, a middle-aged widower, with a very ugly Kalmyk peasant. Anna organised the wedding procession, which included goats, pigs, cows, camels, dogs, reindeer and an elephant with a cage on its back enclosing the bridal couple. After the wedding they were forced to consummate the marriage in a palace built entirely of ice, which Anna had erected on the Neva, with all the furniture, including a four-poster bed, also being carved from ice.

Anna’s unpopularity was compounded by the power she placed in the hands of her lover, Ernst Johann Biron, the handsome son of a groom in her late husband’s stables. She made him a count on her accession in 1730 and Duke of Courland, when her in-laws died out, in 1737. Both Anna and Biron’s principal interest was hunting. According to the Austrian ambassador Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, ‘when the Count Biron talks of horses, or to horses, he speaks like a man, when he speaks of men, or to men, he speaks as a horse might do.’

Anna and Biron shared a taste for the ostentatious and commissioned the top goldsmiths and silversmiths of London, Paris and Augsburg to make them glittering adjuncts to daily living, mostly very large. Anna’s commissions stayed, naturally, in the imperial collection while Biron’s were confiscated and added to it after his exile in 1740.

Anna’s most sumptuous commission was the throne she ordered from the London goldsmith Nicholas Clausen in 1731, its wooden frame encased in silver-gilt of scrolling, Baroque design. The arms end in eagles’ heads and the feet in eagles’ claws clutching silver balls. It can be admired today in the small throne room of the Hermitage. The throne was so popular with Anna’s successors that they had several carved and gilded wooden copies made for other rooms that were used for ceremonial occasions.

Anna also commissioned a solid gold toilet set from the greatest Augsburg craftsman of his day, Johann Ludwig Biller. There are still forty-three pieces in the Hermitage collection, including a mirror, combs, brushes, boxes, perfume bottles and part of a breakfast service – though the set must originally have been much larger. It is one of the most impressive exhibits in the high-security exhibition of the museum’s ‘Special Collection’ of gems and items wrought from precious metal. Among the Biron treasures is a magnificent wine cooler made by the English silversmith Paul de Lamerie in 1726, still in the Baroque style which Britain’s most famous silversmith favoured before he got caught up with the Rococo. It is exceptionally large.

Anna’s most important contribution to the Hermitage, however, was the discovery of the young architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli who later designed the Winter Palace. After her coronation in Moscow, Anna determined to move the court back to St Petersburg and she commissioned Rastrelli, then virtually unknown, to build her a wooden Summer Palace in Peter the Great’s Summer Gardens. She and Biron were delighted with it and showered Rastrelli with commissions. He built an opera house, a riding school so large that it could accommodate seventy-five horsemen simultaneously, and two palaces for Biron in Courland. Anna also commissioned him to rework the old Winter Palace but nothing remains of this building. Under Anna’s successor, the Empress Elizabeth, Rastrelli built the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo and entirely rebuilt the Winter Palace, giving it the appearance that it has today.

Anna’s death in 1740 sparked the most confused succession of the century. Six days before she died she named as her successor the newly born son of her German niece, Anna Leopoldovna. Ivan VI was only two months old when he became emperor on 8 October 1740. Biron had himself named as Regent in order to assure his continuing power. However, he was immensely unpopular and one month later, in a palace coup, he was replaced by Ivan’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern. Biron was arrested in the middle of the night, ripped from his bed by guards who stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth, bound his hands and took him to prison naked, but for a cloak lent him for decency’s sake. He was subsequently exiled to Siberia and his possessions were confiscated.

The Regency went to Anna Leopoldovna’s head. She was pregnant when she became Regent but began a passionate affair with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Julie Mengden. The British ambassador Edward Finch wrote to William Stanhope, Lord Harrington: ‘I should give your lordship but a faint idea of it by adding that the passion of a lover for a new mistress is but a jest to it.’ After her baby was born, Anna switched her affections to the Saxon ambassador Count Maurice Lynar, and then became obsessed with the idea of marrying Mengden to Lynar.

Meanwhile, Peter the Great’s illegitimate daughter Elizabeth was waiting in the wings and the pressure on her from various nobles to oust the baby Ivan and his mother grew in line with Anna’s follies. The news that Anna had decided to have herself declared empress in place of her son finally stung Elizabeth and her supporters into action. In the early hours of 25 November 1741 she arrived by sleigh at the palace accompanied by 360 elite Preobrazhensky guards. The Palace Guard joined them and Elizabeth took over in a bloodless coup.

Elizabeth was much loved, partly on account of her great beauty. ‘Her physical charms are marvellous to behold, her beauty indescribable,’ the Duke of Liria had written in 1728. She loved festivities and kept the court busy with fancy dress balls. As she looked very good dressed as a man, she insisted that men should come to her balls dressed as women and women as men – a directive which was not popular with either sex. She had a passion for clothes and is reputed never to have worn the same dress twice.

The museum contains the mementoes of an extraordinary event that coincided with Elizabeth seizing power in 1741. Nadir Shah, the ruler of Iran (1736–47), had sent an embassy to St Petersburg from India after his conquest of the Mogul Empire in 1739; the journey took two years, as the Shah’s representatives travelled by elephant. They arrived in St Petersburg on 8 October 1741 carrying with them twenty-two elaborate jewelled objects, including plates and bottles, together with fifteen signet rings, all from the colossal booty that Nadir Shah seized from the Mogul treasuries.

These jewelled gifts had been intended for the Empress Anna but the ambassadors quickly took advantage of the confused situation and divided them between the baby Ivan VI, his mother, the Regent, and Elizabeth, who was to seize power the month after their arrival. In the first inventory of the Hermitage collections the jewels were mistakenly described as ‘Persian’ and they were not the focus of any special study until the 1980s when it was realised that the pieces were Indian and that the Persian embassy must have come direct from Delhi. Most of the Mogul jewels and jewel-encrusted ornaments that Nadir Shah took home with him to Iran had the precious stones gouged out of them for reuse. Today the group of Mogul jewelled objects in the Hermitage is the largest in the world to have survived in their original form. Only three mounted pieces have survived in the Iranian treasury and there are none in Indian museums.

The Mogul emperors, then the richest rulers in the world, were the main customers of the Colombian emerald mines after the Spanish conquest of South America in the sixteenth century; Colombian emeralds then, as now, were considered finer than those from any other source. All the emeralds used in the Hermitage pieces came from Colombia via India. There are two bottles whose outer surfaces are encrusted with emeralds – emeralds, rubies and diamonds are the principal stones used in all the pieces. There are several other jewel- encrusted bottles, some plates, a casket, a small table, turban pins and ankle bracelets. They are all wrought from gold but almost all the surfaces are covered over, either with colourful floral enamels or patterns of encrusted precious stones. From the original gift, seventeen jewelled items and one signet ring have survived. The signet ring is inscribed with a commemoration of the birth stars of Shah Jehan, who ruled India from 1631 to 1657 and built the Taj Mahal.

The fourteen elephants that accompanied the embassy were also a gift to the imperial family. In advance of their arrival several of St Petersburg’s bridges had to be rebuilt or reinforced in order to carry the elephants’ weight. A new elephant yard was constructed near the Fontanka River and a square was cleared beside it for them to walk. On 16 October, however, three of the elephants got away from their keepers in the yard. Two were soon restrained but the third broke the wooden fence, escaped into the Summer Palace gardens and got all the way across to Vasilevsky Island where he wrought havoc in a village before being caught.

The crowning glory of Elizabeth’s reign, as far as the Hermitage is concerned, was the construction of the Winter Palace itself, one of the most beautiful Baroque buildings in the world. It grows out of the ground like a giant’s wedding cake on a platter. The white columns, in two ranges, connect the earth with the sky in soaring lines. It has changed colour several times over the centuries, starting life yellow and white, shifting to green and white in the mid-nineteenth century, and temporarily turning brick-red all over in the early twentieth century. Today the building is faced in plaster painted a soft, sea green, against which the white columns and window surrounds stand out. Above the windows are masks and shell mouldings picked out in bronze paint. The coppered roof has turned green and match the walls, as have the double life-size bronze statues that embellish the balustrade that runs round it – gods, goddesses, nymphs and urns.

The Russian imperial family had built several previous Winter Palaces at different locations along the banks of the Neva. The present building is the sixth, if one counts the wooden Winter Palace that Rastrelli made for use while his masterpiece was under construction. His plans were approved in 1754 and it took a year to clear the jumble of buildings that already existed on the site.

To quote the architectural historian Audrey Kennett:

The Winter Palace was completed in 1762, six months after Elizabeth’s death, and was first used by Peter III and Catherine the Great.