The State Hermitage in St Petersburg is Russia’s premier museum. It has one of the greatest collections in the world, on a par with the Louvre, the British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Prior to the opening of the extended Grand Louvre in the 1990s the Hermitage was the world’s largest museum. With the completion of the restoration of the General Staff Building in 2014 the Hermitage regained its pre-eminence.
The museum began life as the private collection of the Russian tsars, housed in two pavilions built onto their Winter Palace in central St Petersburg by Catherine the Great, which are known today as the Small Hermitage and the Old Hermitage. Catherine’s grandson, Nicholas I, had the idea of building a museum extension on to the palace and sharing his own art treasures with the public. This building is known as the New Hermitage and first opened its doors in 1852.
After the Revolution in 1917 the whole of the palace complex was gradually turned over to the nationalised museum, thereafter known as the State Hermitage. It was swollen by accretions from confiscated private collections but depleted by the requirement to share its treasures with Moscow and other regional museums. In the 1930s some great paintings were sold abroad to bolster the national treasury.
The imperial collection, as it existed before the Revolution, comprised Old Master paintings, Classical antiquities, coins and medals, an Arsenal and some medieval and Renaissance works of art. In the 1920s an Oriental Department was added, in the 1930s an Archaeological Department and in the 1940s a department devoted to Russian works of art.
The collection today is encyclopaedic. In addition to superb works of art, it contains many imperial eccentricities, such as Peter the Great’s underwear and Catherine’s coronation coach. The architectural complex in which it is housed, lining a bank of the River Neva, is one of the wonders of the world.
This book attempts to sketch the museum’s turbulent history, laying special emphasis on the twentieth century and the interaction of the museum with Russia’s seventy-year experiment with Communism.