To understand what happened to the Hermitage in the twentieth century, it is necessary to look at the history of art collecting in St Petersburg – not just the collecting activity of the tsars but also that of noblemen, scholars, artists and the newly rich merchant class. As a result of the Revolution, the museum was to inherit the fruits of their endeavours. All private collections became State property at a stroke of Lenin’s pen, including university and private museum collections. The best pickings came to the Hermitage.
The imperial capital was home to the greatest aristocratic families of Russia, many of whom formed magnificent collections. Most were begun in the eighteenth century and some in earlier times. None of these families seem to have seen the threat of confiscation coming, unlike the French aristocrats who managed to ship their collections to London for sale by James Christie at the end of the eighteenth century. And, in the nineteenth century the ranks of collectors were swelled by newly rich merchants and industrialists who developed a passion for art and had the resources to indulge it.
In nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere in Europe and America, appalling living conditions for the poor went hand in hand with an explosion of high-minded, charitable activity. Rich benefactors not only founded orphanages, schools and hospitals, but also turned their hands to setting up museums. There were many of them in St Petersburg, founded for a variety of idiosyncratic purposes – from the study of the Byzantine church, to the display of cuneiform tablets and the popularisation of modern French art. They were all nationalised by the Bolsheviks and parts of their collections came to the Hermitage.
In the last two decades before the Revolution there was an explosion of artistic activity in both St Petersburg and Moscow which had a major impact on the rest of Europe. Alexandre Benois, Sergey Diaghilev and their friends mounted ballets and operas, started magazines and organised exhibitions which helped put Russia at the forefront of the world art scene. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had a sensational success in Paris while Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Paul Chagall, Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov are counted among the pioneers of twentieth-century painting. Several of the people who participated in this renaissance of artistic activity also became involved with the Hermitage just before or just after the Revolution.
Among the great aristocratic collections of St Petersburg pride of place must be given to the Stroganov Palace and its art gallery, which was briefly turned into an outstation of the Hermitage after the Revolution. The collection, sadly, did not survive intact. In 1928 the palace was closed to the public and a selection of treasures were incorporated into the Hermitage collection. The rest were auctioned off in 1931 in a spectacular sale at the Lepke Gallery in Berlin in order to earn foreign exchange for the Soviet government.
The Stroganovs were the richest noble family in Russia. They began mining salt at Solvychegodsk in the far north in the early sixteenth century, built a cathedral there and helped found many other towns and villages. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, two pious Stroganovs commissioned many small icons for their homes – the first icons painted for private individuals rather than churches – giving rise to the so-called Stroganov School of icon painting, noted for its rich colour and exquisite draughtsmanship. The family’s salt and iron mines in the Urals enabled them to maintain a private army with which they helped obtain the annexation of Siberia by Russia in the 1580s. They also helped the government out when its coffers were empty and backed the accession of Michael, the first Romanov, in 1613. They were faithful servants of the tsars and in the eighteenth century took to art collecting.
Rastrelli, the architect of the Winter Palace, built them the greatest private house in St Petersburg on the comer of the Moika Canal and Nevsky Prospect. Count Alexander Stroganov filled it with art during the eighteenth century. He travelled all over Europe, buying Old Masters and commissioning paintings and sculpture. He commissioned a Houdon bust of Catherine the Great, bought a great Poussin – The Flight into Egypt – which now adorns the Hermitage, and decorated a whole room with Hubert Robert landscape panels – which have also ended up there. Paul I appointed him President of the Academy of Arts.
However, Alexander Stroganov’s greatest gift to St Petersburg was bringing up and educating the son of a peasant girl from his estates, Andrey Voronikhin, who became a leading architect – legend has it that Alexander was his father. He launched Voronikhin’s career by getting him to redesign the interior of the Stroganov Palace, adding a picture gallery and an adjoining Egyptian room for the display of Russia’s first collection of Egyptian antiquities. Voronikhin went on to design St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral, a northern adaptation of St Peter’s in Rome, which took eleven years to build, from 1800 to 1811, employing thousands of serfs. He also became a noted furniture designer, working for Maria Fedorovna, Paul I’s widow, and designing some of the finest hardstone vases in the Hermitage.
Alexander Stroganov’s legitimate son and successor, Pavel, was also a picture collector, while Pavel’s cousin and heir, Sergey, collected icons, Renaissance furniture and coins and medals. Sergey’s three sons were also collectors; Grigory and Pavel collected Old Masters while Alexander collected coins. The break-up of the collection housed in the Stroganov Palace thus enriched virtually every department of the Hermitage. Stroganov treasures are to be found in many surprising places around the museum. In the rotunda at the end of the Dutch Picture Gallery, for instance, there are two side tables from the Egyptian Gallery that Voronikhin designed for Alexander Stroganov. Topped with slabs of rich blue lapis lazuli, the tables are wrought from ebony, bronze and ormolu, with mirror backs and blue and white painted friezes reminiscent of Wedgwood. The front legs are columns, topped and tailed by Egyptian priestesses. Their bronze torsos, with gilded hairdos and bare bronze bosoms, connect the columns to the table top while, at the bottom of the column, their brown bronze feet peep out of ormolu drapery.
Among the other important family collections that found their way to the Hermitage after 1917 were those of the Shuvalovs and Yusupovs. In the mid-eighteenth century Ivan Shuvalov had been the Empress Elizabeth’s lover en titre and became a great patron of art and education; he founded both the St Petersburg Academy of Arts and Moscow University. Catherine the Great considered the Baroque pomp of his palace and art gallery exaggerated. ‘This house,’ she wrote, ‘which is large in itself, is so ornamented that it reminds one of cuffs made from Alençon lace.’ He gave his picture collection to the Academy of Art, whence it was removed to the Hermitage in the 1920s. Meanwhile, from the family palace came the rich collection of medieval and Renaissance applied arts – silver, majolica, bronzes, Limoges enamels – formed by Elizaveta Shuvalova in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Nikolay Yusupov was a friend of Catherine the Great, who sent him on many diplomatic missions. He commissioned paintings and bought Old Masters in Rome and Paris. He brought two of the Hermitage’s great Canovas back to St Petersburg, the Cupid and Psyche and the Winged Cupid. In 1798 he became director of the Imperial Tapestry Works, in 1792 director of the Imperial Glass and Porcelain Manufactory, and in 1797 administrator of the Hermitage – an honorary post awarded him by Paul I who wanted to have nothing to do with his mother’s collection. The great art collection Nikolay Yusupov formed was, of course, extended by subsequent generations of the family and by 1917 it was housed in their Palace on the Moika river – in whose cellars Rasputin was assassinated in 1916 by a group of Felix Yusupov’s friends.
In 1919 a Komsomol patrol was given the job of searching the Yusupov palace where the family had literally walled up their treasures. The leader of the group, one Pavel Usanov, wrote an account of how they bullied the forty servants who remained into revealing the hiding places. Last, and most difficult to find, were the paintings, a better collection than graces most European ‘National Galleries’, both in number and quality, despite the fact that Felix Yusupov had left Russia with two Rembrandts in his baggage.
Trembling with fear, the manager agreed to show the place where the pictures were hidden. Turning a plate that was virtually invisible he pushed a part of the wall which was faced with tiles. It turned out to be a door leading to a storage room in which there were numerous cases full of paintings. There it was, the goal of our quest, a collection of paintings famous all over Europe! It took the young members of the Komsomol team a whole day to clear the storage room of paintings. Specialists and artists came to the palace to see them.
The Shuvalov and Yusupov Palaces were opened to the public as museums after the Revolution, as were palaces all over Russia. Art became the property of the people after 1917 and the first curators were filled with idealism. The government did not, however, have the resources to support hundreds of small museums and decided to keep only the bigger ones open, amalgamating collections. In the mid-1920s most of St Petersburg’s palace museums were closed down and, since the government was now desperate for foreign exchange, many of their treasures were sold abroad.
Most private museums were also closed down at that time, with the best pieces passing to the Hermitage. The sheer number of such museums is a remarkable measure of Russian cultural achievement. There was the Museum of Old St Petersburg set up by Petr Weiner, publisher of the art magazine Starye Gody, the Museum of Old Russian Art attached to the Academy of Art, the Museum of the Russian Archaeological Society, the Archaeological Museum attached to the St Petersburg Religious Seminary, the Likhachov Museum of Palaeography, the Ethnographic Museum attached to the Academy of Science, a second Ethnographic Museum attached to the Russian Museum, the Kushelevskaya Gallery of contemporary paintings attached to the Academy of Art, the Museum of Artistic Craftsmanship sponsored by the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and the Stieglitz Museum – the St Petersburg equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – to name but a few. Their stories are various and colourful.
Petr Sevastyanov, the son of a merchant from Penza, who collected icons and early church art for the Academy’s Museum of Old Russian Art, was a particularly notable figure. His interest lay in tracing the sources of Christian art and he attempted to construct an encyclopaedia of Christian iconography based on his own collection. That such an endeavour should have brought him fame and worldly success underlines the fundamental importance of the Orthodox Church in nineteenth-century Russia. From the autocrats, who believed themselves appointed by God to dictate the fate of Russia, down to the poorest peasant, the church filled every individual life with hope and fear. In 1861 the Academy acquired 135 icons and frescoes and 125 items of applied art from Sevastyanov’s collection, including a 1363 icon of Christ Pantocrator from Mount Athos, in Greece, now one of the stars of the Hermitage collection.
Where Sevastyanov was far ahead of his time, however, was in the use of the camera as an aid to research. In 1857–8 he spent half a year in the ancient monastic community on Mount Athos photographing Byzantine objects and manuscripts – photography had only been invented in the 1830s and had never previously been used in this way. He compiled some 5,000 photographs which caused a sensation when they were exhibited, along with drawings and copies of works of art, in Paris in 1858. In 1861, at the Emperor’s request, he set up an exhibition in the White Hall of the Winter Palace and an enlarged version of the exhibition moved to the Academy of Arts later in the year.
In 1862 the Academy of Arts received a spectacular bequest in quite a different field – a whole museum collection of paintings and contemporary art together with a private palace, built in the eighteenth century by Quarenghi, in which to display them. Count Nikolay Kushelev-Bezborodko died in Nice, leaving the Academy 466 paintings and twenty-nine sculptures, together with his house on Pochtamtskaya, in his will – a will which was immediately, but unsuccessfully, contested by his relatives. The Museum was opened to the public in 1863 and became known as the Kushelevskaya Gallery. Its particular significance for St Petersburg was the collection of contemporary French painting, over 200 works of the Romantic school including pieces by Delacroix, Courbet, Theodore Rousseau, Millet, and Corot.
Some of them had been shown in a big exhibition of art from private collections organised in 1851 by the Duke of Leuchtenberg – Nicholas I’s son-in-law and President of the Academy of Arts – where they met the kind of critical hostility traditionally reserved for works of the extreme avant-garde. By 1922, however, when they arrived in the Hermitage, the collection had been recognised as the most important repository of nineteenth-century European painting in Russia. The pictures had been evacuated to Moscow during World War I and it took a lot of political arm-twisting to secure them for the museum.
The Kushelevskaya Gallery also included, through inheritance, part of the Old Master collection formed by Catherine the Great’s chancellor, Prince Alexander Bezborodko, a famous collection compiled with a determination to impress by a great arriviste. Bezborodko himself wrote the best description of it: ‘By dint of hot zeal, my friends’ aid, and approximately 100,000 roubles spent in the course of less than three years, I have formed a good collection, surpassing that of Stroganov’s both in numbers and in quality.’ The collection passed to his brother, Nikolay’s great-grandfather, and was split up among descendants through whom, by various different routes, some 300 of the chancellor’s paintings eventually reached the Hermitage.
Bezborodko particularly liked buying works of art that had formerly graced French royal collections. Among his treasures was a marble statue of Cupid which Falconet had made for Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Both Catherine the Great and Stroganov had copies of it, but Bezborodko claimed to have the original. The poet Gavriil Derzhavin wrote a poem about seeing it in his house:
I saw a Cupid in the home of Croesus.
He sat Crying in a marble grotto
Amidst a forest of arrows….
Is his flame powerless?
Vain the stream of his tears?
Alas, he now owns himself defeated
For Croesus has no love to give.
The most ambitious of the institutional collections which later came to be incorporated in the Hermitage was that of the Stieglitz Museum. In 1876 Baron Alexander Stieglitz, a privy councillor, merchant and banker to the court, asked the Ministry of Finance to accept a donation of one million roubles to finance the foundation of a new School of Industrial Arts. The then Emperor, Alexander II, wrote him a personal letter of thanks and agreed that the school should be named in memory of the Baron’s father, a German émigré who had made a vast trading fortune in Russia. The idea for this amazingly generous gesture seems to have come from Stieglitz’s son-in-law, Alexander Polovtsov, who later became Alexander Ill’s cabinet secretary and was the chairman of the school board. There is a revealing entry in his diary, which he made during a visit to London in 1875: ‘Russia will be happy when businessmen donate their money for schooling and educational purposes without any hope of reward.’
His father-in-law’s School of Industrial Arts opened in 1881 with a small Museum and Library on the first floor. The museum exhibits were fairly miscellaneous since all had come as gifts from local collectors, mainly noble friends of Polovtsov’s, such as Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, the ‘acting director’ of the Hermitage, and Count A. V. Bobrinsky. Polovtsov even got a gift of artefacts from Schliemann’s excavations at Troy after meeting the archaeologist on board ship in the Dardanelles.
However, on the death of Baron Stieglitz in 1884, the resources of the School were dramatically multiplied. He left the institution 9,690,642 roubles and 32 kopeks in silver. Polovtsov immediately commissioned the director of the School, a noted architect called Maximilian Mesmacher, to design a new museum building. Mesmacher travelled all over Europe in search of inspiration and finally erected one of the most elaborate and magnificent realisations of the Historicist style. He borrowed designs from Pompei, from Renaissance Venice, from medieval Germany, from Baroque France and put them all together, with pillared halls, stairways, and galleries, into a brightly painted stucco and marble shell to contain the collection; it was opened by Nicholas II in April 1896.
Polovtsov, meanwhile, embarked on a tremendous spending spree, purchasing treasures for the museum in Paris, Vienna and Italy. Among the highlights of his acquisitions, now in the Hermitage, is a series of marble reliefs by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Lombardo which were made to decorate the marble rooms of Alfonso d’Este’s palace in Ferrara, and a series of five huge wall panels depicting scenes from the history of the Roman Empire by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, which were commissioned in the 1720s for the Palazzo Dolfm in Venice. By 1902 the museum owned 15,000 items, reflecting the decorative arts of every historic period. Polovtsov’s son, who was also a collector, was responsible for adding a huge Oriental collection. He had worked for the government in the Caucasus, bringing back many Middle Eastern treasures, and later became interested in the art of China and Japan. Most of the contents of the Stieglitz museum came to the Hermitage, in stages, between 1925 and 1941, along with its curators.
While the arrival of such collections at the Hermitage was to radically alter its profile, there had been a brief renaissance of museum activity just before the Revolution, following the appointment of Count Dmitry Tolstoy as director in 1909, after decades of neglect. When Vasilchikov resigned as director for health reasons in 1888, the museum had entered a period of stagnation. Prince Sergey Trubetskoy was appointed ‘acting director’, a title he retained for eleven years since he never chose to live in St Petersburg. He had served in the army in the Caucasus and made a home in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he remained. His salary as ‘acting director’ of the Hermitage was transferred to Tbilisi – 979 roubles and 99 kopeks a month, of which 326 roubles and 66 kopeks was specifically identified as payment for food. His deputy ran the museum.
In 1899 Trubetskoy was replaced by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, a former diplomat who was also director of the Imperial Theatres. However, it made little difference since the government made no money available for purchases and Nicholas and Alexandra more or less ignored the museum. Visitors were further discouraged by new entry regulations instituted after the 1905 revolution to ensure that no revolutionary ‘meetings’ took place there. It became necessary to show a passport or identity document at the entrance and to write your name and title in a special book in the vestibule.
Then in 1909 Count Tolstoy took over. He was a lawyer who had worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and who was already assistant director of the Russian Museum – he combined the two jobs. A popular figure in St Petersburg’s artistic community, he managed to persuade several private collectors to donate paintings to the museum. In 1911–12 the two Stroganov brothers – Grigory who lived in Rome, and Pavel who lived in St Petersburg – each gave an important group of paintings to the Hermitage, the first by donation, the second by bequest. Among Grigory’s were a Simone Martini Madonna of the Annunciation and a shrine decorated by Fra Angelico; Pavel’s bequest included a Cima da Conegliano, a Filippino Lippi and a Domenichino. In 1914 the museum acquired its second Leonardo da Vinci, the so-called Benois Madonna, by purchase – at a bargain price – from the Benois family. The painting belonged at the time to the widowed mother of Alexandre Benois, the artist, art historian and pundit who was to play a key role in the Hermitage’s affairs at the time of the Revolution. We will come back to the painting later.
Benois, more than any other, was responsible for the explosion of artistic activity in St Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Born in 1870 in St Petersburg, he was a typical product of the city’s foreign community; his grandfather had been Paul I’s French chef and his father, the godson of Paul I’s widow, Maria Fedorovna, was educated at her expense to become one of Russia’s leading architects. Alexandre’s maternal grandfather was also an architect, Alberto Cavos, who specialised in building theatres and opera houses. He built the Mariinsky in St Petersburg and the Bolshoi Moscow and had been chosen to build the Paris Opéra when he died unexpectedly. Cavos was a Venetian by birth and a passionate art collector; the young Alexandre Benois grew up glorying in the remains of his collection. In addition, Alberto Cavos’s father, a successful composer, had moved from Venice to St Petersburg where he became Director of Music to the Imperial Theatres. Thus music and theatre and design were woven into Benois’s background.
It was while he was still at the May School that Alexandre Benois and a group of friends founded a society called the ‘Nevsky Pickwickians’ who met at each other’s houses and passionately debated art, literature and music. Benois was their leading spirit and proselytiser. In 1890, the year when they all left school and moved on to the university, Benois met a young artist called Leon Bakst, and introduced him to the group; later in the same year Benois’s school friend Dmitry Filosofov introduced to the Pickwickians his country cousin, one Serge Diaghilev, who had just arrived in St Petersburg to study law. The hearty young provincial Diaghilev had no knowledge of art and was educated, in this respect, by Benois.
Thus was born the group of friends who transformed the artistic environment of St Petersburg. Their aims were both nationalist and internationalist; they wanted to promote a Russian art which would, for the first time, contribute to the mainstream of Western culture. There were painters, composers, writers, actors and dancers. Diaghilev, who was none of these things, turned out to be a brilliant manager, connoisseur and talent spotter. His first important initiatives involved organising exhibitions and launching the magazine Mir Iskusstva, or ‘World of Art’. Benois later explained that Mir Iskusstva was actually a society, an exhibiting organisation and a magazine:
I consider that Mir Iskusstva should not be understood as any one of these three things separately, but all in one; more accurately as a kind of community which lived its own life, with its own peculiar interests and problems and which tried in a number of ways to influence society and to inspire in it a desirable attitude to art – art understood in its broadest sense, that is to say including literature and music.
The magazine itself ran from 1898 to 1904, a beautiful production comparable to the Studio in England, laying special stress on typography and design; several of the group were interested in fine book illustration and found an outlet for this with the magazine. They included Benois whose illustrations to Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman, which were published in the magazine in 1904, won international fame, adding yet another layer to the artistic impact of Falconet’s great sculpture. The group held their first exhibition in 1899, which included embroidery from the artists’ community at Abramtsevo, Tiffany and Lalique glass, and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, Degas and Monet, as well as work by young Russian artists. Diaghilev organised eleven exhibitions between 1897 and 1906, presenting modern European art in Russia and, in 1906, Russian art in Paris.
In 1899 Diaghilev was appointed a junior assistant to Prince Sergey Volkonsky, director of the Imperial Theatres, and Filosofov got a job at the Dramatic Theatre. It was enough to turn the attention of the whole group to theatre, ballet and opera – designing, composing, writing and choreographing. Benois and Bakst, who went on to design productions for all the world’s great theatres, each did their first show at the Hermitage Theatre. Diaghilev was sacked in 1901 and subsequently developed his talents as an impresario in Paris rather than St Petersburg, ably abetted by Benois. However, he remained active in other spheres in St Petersburg.
This ferment of artistic activity affected the Hermitage in numerous ways. One feature of the new art of St Petersburg was its antiquarianism. Benois produced many watercolours depicting eighteenth-century St Petersburg and often visited the Hermitage for inspiration. He was the most popular art writer of his day, running a magazine called Artistic Treasures of Russia (Khudozhestvennyya sokrovishcha Rossii) from 1901 to 1907, which profiled many of the great private art collections. Among the contributors were Ernest Liphart and James Schmidt, who had charge of the Hermitage picture gallery, and Stepan Yaremich, an artist and collector of drawings, who joined the staff after the Revolution. This meant that the Hermitage employees were in touch with private collectors and received gifts and benefactions as a result.
Benois’s most enduring love was the city of St Petersburg itself. ‘I sensed the beauty of my town, I liked everything in it, and later I realised its importance too,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘The Germans are patriots of their country as a whole: Deutschland über alles. I was moved – and still am – by one compelling emotion: Petersburg über alles.’ This led him, from the position of influence he had achieved in the early years of the century, to do all he could for the Hermitage. He personally researched and published a guidebook to the museum collection which was published in 1913.
Another of Benois’s friends and exact contemporaries – they were born in the same year – was Sergey Troinitsky, who became director of the Hermitage after the Revolution. He came from a noble family and, like Benois, had studied law at university, taking up art as a hobby. His special enthusiasm was for the applied arts of which he developed a wide-ranging knowledge, becoming an acknowledged expert on porcelain, silver, objets de vertu and heraldry. In 1905 he founded the Sirius printing house which published two art magazines that attempted to take over the role of Mir Iskusstva after the latter’s closure in 1904: Starye Gody (Past Years) and Apollon. The first magazine, as its name implies, had an antiquarian orientation, while the second focused more closely on modern art.
Troinitsky remained in charge of artistic matters at the Sirius Press up to 1917 but from 1908 also worked at the Hermitage. His first job was in the medieval and Renaissance section where he was given charge of the Basilewski collection. In 1913 he moved across to become keeper of the section of objets de vertu and, when Tolstoy left Russia in 1918, he was unanimously elected director of the Hermitage, a post he retained until 1927.
The idea of magazines organising exhibitions, which was pioneered by Mir Iskusstva, was carried on by its successors. Starye Gody organised an important exhibition of paintings from private Russian collections in 1908, the first time that many of the works were seen in public, while Apollon held an exhibition of modern European art in 1912. It was in the context of the 1908 exhibition that the Benois Madonna was ‘rediscovered’.
The painting of the Virgin dandling her baby on her knee in a lightly sketched interior had always been known as a Leonardo in the Benois family. According to family tradition, it had been bought in Astrakhan by Mrs Benois’s maternal grandfather, a merchant called Sapozhnikov, from some Italian travelling musicians. The attribution had, however, never been tested in the fire of public opinion. In the exhibition catalogue the painting was described as ‘Leonardo da Vinci?’ It was Ernest Liphart, keeper of paintings at the Hermitage, who launched the argument in favour of this attribution in an article in Starye Gody in 1908.
‘I have the courage of my conviction,’ he wrote, ‘despite the outcry that this attribution will give rise to. The painting is not pleasing at first sight, I agree; but study it and you will find yourself, little by little, discovering the mysterious charm of this modest, early work by the artist who later became the great, the unique Leonardo.’ The attribution was accepted by most contemporary scholars without serious argument, although one or two suggested that it might be by one of Andrea del Verrocchio’s pupils. It is now firmly enshrined in the Leonardo oeuvre.
After the sensation the painting caused at the exhibition, the Benois family decided to sell it and, in 1913, asked the English dealer Joseph Duveen who was already making a name as the man for selling expensive paintings to American millionaires to handle the sale. Its export caused an outcry in Russia. Duveen had offered 500,000 francs but the Benois family now changed the deal. Ownership of the painting would not be transferred to Duveen until 1 January 1914, at the earliest, and only then if the Hermitage did not want it. In the event the painting, one of only two Leonardo oils to have come on the market in the twentieth century, was sold to the Hermitage for 150,000 roubles, to be paid in instalments.