This is one of Russia's oldest art museums, founded in 1757 along with the "Academy of the Three Noblest Arts"- painting, sculpture and architecture. It was originally conceived as an academic museum for the preservation of works by the Academy's students, especially those who hail received awards or other honours. As time went by, however, the museum gradually accumulated one of the finest art collections in the country. The museum is housed in the halls of the so-called ''Circle'1, the central block of the Academy building constructed between 1764 and 1788 to plans by the architects Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe and Alexander Kokorinov.
Visitors can see works by Russian artists from the mid-18th century to the present; a collection of plaster casts of classical and Western European sculpture; architectural drawings and designs; and a unique collection of wooden models of the Academy, the Stock Exchange, St. Michael's Castle, the Smolny Convent (made under Bartolomeo Rastrelli's supervision) and other famous buildings, A marvellous academic collection of 32 models of ancient Roman monuments, made from cork by A. Chicchi in 1774, is also to he found here.
On the whole, the displays reflect the history of the Russian academic and Soviet art schools. Among the names represented are Anton Losenko, Ivan Prokofiev, Fedor Gordeyev, Theodosius Shchedrin, Karl Briullov, Gavriil Skorodumov, Alexander Ivanov, Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov, Vasily Mathe, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva and many others. A large number of training assignments and diploma works by Academy students are also on show.
The studio of the great Ukrainian poet and artist Taras Shevchenko, who lived and worked in a small flat located in a wing of the Academy building from 1858 to his death in 1861, constitutes an independent department in the museum.
The Museum of Theatrical and Musical Arts was founded in Petrograd in 1918 and its first exhibition opened in 1922. The museum is housed in the building of the Board of the Imperial Theatres and the Theatre School (begun in 1828, architect Carlo Rossi) which forms part of the magnificent Ostrovsky Square ensemble, dominated by the Alexandrinsky Theatre.
The exhibition gives a detailed account of the history of Russian theatrical art. The original museum reserves consisted of works of art collected by Ivan Gorbunov, an actor of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. In the 1920s, the archives of the Board of the Imperial Theatres were transferred here along with private collections belonging to actors and theatrical figures. The museum contains the personal archives of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, Marius Petipa, Maria Savina, Olga Spesivtseva and many other luminaries. It also boasts a striking collection of portraits of theatrical figures and actors, designs and models of 18th-20th century stage sets created by such artists as Giuseppe Valeriani, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst, Nikolai Sapunov, Kasimir Malevich, Nathan Altman and Nikolai Akimov. Theatrical posters, programmes, rare photographs, the personal effects of famous actors, and memorabilia connected with the names of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Agrip-pina Vaganova, Lyubov Blok and other leading lights of the theatre world are all to be seen here. One can explore a unique collection of authentic theatrical costumes and an extensive selection of audio-recordings.
The museum has a video lecture-hall and a concert hall for meetings and musical events.
The Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts was founded in 1878 at the Baron Stieglitz School of Technical Design by its first director, the architect Maximilian Messmacher. The building, which houses the museum, was constructed to his design between 1885 and 1895. Thanks to Messmacher, one of Europe's richest collections of decorative and applied arts was amassed here. Originally an educational institution, the museum eventually housed about 30,000 exhibits, most of which were transferred to the Hermitage following the 1917 revolution. The museum at the Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry (the former Stieglitz School) was only opened to visitors in 1945.
At present the museum displays examples of Russian and Western European minor arts (I6th-20th centuries), as well as Soviet applied art and industrial design. There are remarkable collections of Russian tiled stoves (18th century) and Soviet textiles (1920s-40s). Works by the School's former pupils take pride of place in the exhibition, which is regularly augmented with the output of the Academy students.
The Hermitage is one of the world's greatest art museums and Russia's largest art repository, totalling about three million exhibits.
The date of its foundation is considered to be 1764, when the first consignment of 225 paintings, acquired by Catherine II in Berlin, arrived in St. Petersburg. In 1863 the Hermitage became a public museum.
At present the museum occupies five buildings: the Winter Palace (1754-62, architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli), the Small Hermitage (1764-77, architect Yuri Velten and Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe), the Old Hermitage (1770-87, architect Yuri Velten), the New Hermitage (1842-51, architect Leo von Klenze) and the Hermitage Theatre (1783-87, architect Giacomo Quarenghi). There is also an exhibition at the Menshikov Palace, a branch of the Hermitage.
The purchase of art collections for the imperial family continued until 1917. The first of these was the collection of Count Heinrich Bruhl, bought in 1769 from his heirs in Dresden. It consisted of 600 canvases, including such masterpieces as Portrait of an Old Man in Red by Rembrandt, Perseus and Andromeda by Rubens and the Deposition by Poussin. At a later date, the famous collections of Sir Robert Walpole and Count Baudouin were acquired from London and Paris.
Besides paintings, the museum also acquired collections of prints and drawings, classical antiquities, objects of Western European applied art, weapons, coins, medals and books (Voltaire's library). In the 19th century the Hermitage began to receive archaeological artefacts which, among other things, formed the nucleus of the celebrated collection of Scythian gold.
After the 1917 revolution, numerous works of art found their way into the museum, following the nationalization of private collections. Especially important additions came from the Petrograd mansions of the nobility: the Yusupovs, Sheremetevs, Shuvalovs and Stroganovs, to name but four. In Soviet times the museum's reserves were considerably augmented with materials brought back from scientific expeditions.
In order to take in all the collections currently on show you would have to cover a distance of 22 km. It would take you almost 15 years to embrace all the treasures, spending 8 hours a day in the museum and for a minute examining each exhibit.
In the Hermitage you can explore the art of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Classical Greece and its colonies in the northern Black Sea coast area. You can also examine the culture of the Etruscans and the primitive tribes of Siberia, as well as seeing Egyptian mummies, antique pottery, Tanagra statuary, Roman sculptural portraits, Scythian and Sarmatian artefacts, the unique complex of the Pazyryk burial mound of the 6th-4th centuries B.C., and many other things.
The Western European Department covers the art of Italy (8th-18th centuries), Spain (15th-19th centuries), the Netherlands, Holland and Flanders (15th-17th centuries), France (15th-20th centuries), Germany (15th-18th centuries) and England (17th-19th centuries). Its displays include masterpieces by great painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Tiepolo, El Greco, Jose Ribera, Francisco Zurbaran, Diego Velazquez, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Francisco Goya, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Snyders, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Hans Holbein the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Eugene Delacroix, Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Pierre Bonnard, Albert Marquet and Fernand Leger. Also to be found here are exquisite sculptures by Michelangelo, Antonio Canova, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Antoine Houdon and Auguste Rodin, and displays of Western European arms (15th-17th centuries), Italian majolicas, tapestries, Limoges enamels and Sevres porcelains.
The Department of the History of Russian Culture contains a great variety of masterials, dating right back to Ancient Rus'. Particularly noteworthy are exhibits from the Petrine era and the mid-to late 18th century. An exhibition entitled "The Artistic Decoration of the 19th century Russian Interior" is permanently on view.
The interiors of the Winter Palace are among the masterpieces of Russian monumental and applied arts. They were decorated according to designs by such illustrious artists as Rastrelli, Vasily Stasov, Carlo Rossi, Auguste Montferrand, Alexander Briullov and Andrei Stakenschneider. Of particular interest are the Jordan Staircase, the Field-Marshal's Hall, the Small Throne Room, the Gallery of 1812 (a monument to Russia's military victories), the Hall of St. George (The Great Throne Room), the Malachite Hall and the Hermitage Theatre.
The exhibition "The Winter Palace of Peter I", which opened in 1992, is devoted to the founder of the city. It is situated on the site of the former palace of the first Russian emperor. The foundation and the walls of the palace were uncovered during a restoration of the Hermitage Theatre.
The world's largest repository of Russian art, the museum was founded in 1895 and opened to the public in 1898 as "Emperor Alexander Ill's Imperial Museum of Russian Art".
The Russian Museum is housed in the Mikhailovsky Palace, built between 1819 and 1825 by Carlo Rossi for Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich. The facades and interiors were decorated by the sculptors, Vasily Demuth-Malinovsky and Stepan Pimenov, and the painters, Giovanni Battista, Pietro Scotti, Antonio Vighi and Barnaba Medici. The main staircase and the White-Columned Hall survive in their original form. The decor of the other rooms was lost during the reconstruction of the palace as a public museum (architect Vasily Svinin). The western wing, named after its chief architect Leonty Benois (assisted by Sergei Ovsiannikov), was constructed between 1914 and 1919 to accommodate the rapidly expanding collections.
The bulk of the museum's exhibits are works of Russian art from the Hermitage, the Academy of Arts and the suburban royal palaces, as well as various other acquisitions and donations. After the 1917 revolution, its stocks were considerably increased following the nationalization of private collections.
Today the Russian Museum totals over 320,000 units of storage, illustrating the development of Russian art from the 11th century to the present day. It boasts superb collections of Russian and Soviet paintings, one of Russia's finest collections of sculpture and graphic art, and works of applied, decorative and folk art.
The Department of Early Russian Art takes pride in its world-famous icon paintings by Andrei Rublev, Dionysius and Simon Ushakov. It also boasts old wooden sculptures, stone and bone carvings, embroideries and jewellery. Especially rich and varied is the exhibition devoted to the art of the 18th and early 19th century. It displays works by the first secular artists of Peter I's time, Ivan Nikitin, Andrei Matveyev and Ivan Vishniakov; profound portraits by Fedor Rokotov, Dmitry Levitsky, Vladimir Borovikovsky and Orest Kiprensky; canvases by Alexei Venetsianov, Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, Pavel Fedotov; and sculptures by Fedot Shubin, Mikhail Kozlovsky and Ivan Martos. The second half of the 19th century is represented by the Itinerants (members of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions), Ilya Repin and Vasily Surikov. The late 19th and early 20th centuries are featured in numerous works by Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov, artists of the Silver Age and the Russian avant-garde -groups such as the World of Art, Blue Rose and Jack of Diamonds, as well as Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Marc Chagall and Pavel Filonov.
The exhibition of the Department of Soviet Art includes canvases and sculptures by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Arkady Rylov, Nikolai Krymov, Alexander Matveyev, Anna Golubkina, Vera Mukhina, Sergei Konenkov, Peter Konchalovsky, Sergei Gerasimov, Alexander Deineka, Arkady Plastov and many others. Large exhibitions of folk art and the art of the turn of the century have recently been opened.
Temporary exhibitions from the museum's reserves and other Russian and foreign collections are regularly held in the halls of the Benois Wing.
If you book your winter tours till the end of December, you get the price of 15€ p/h for January and 10€ p/h for February.
