In 1808 Franz Labensky, Keeper of the Hermitage picture gallery from 1797 to 1849, was fortunate enough to make several extremely valuable acquisitions in Paris, including Caravaggio’s
The major highlight in the history of the Museum in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the acquisition of the Malmaison collection of Empress Josephine, the first wife of Napoleon. Composed of the spoils of the Napoleonic wars (most of its paintings previously belonged to the famous Cassel Gallery), the Malmaison collection enriched the Hermitage with 118 canvases by Dutch, Flemish, and French artists, including Rembrandt, Rubens, Claude Lorrain (his
In 1814—15 the Amsterdam collection of the English banker Coesvelt was bought. Its main attraction were the pictures of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish school hitherto represented in the Museum only by a few Murillos. The Coesvelt collection brought in paintings by almost all major Spanish masters, including Francisco Zurbaran, Francisco Ribalta, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Antonio Pereda, and Diego Velazquez.
The interest in Spanish painting which marked the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and the availability on the art market of a considerable number of Spanish pictures, enabled the Hermitage to enlarge its section of Spanish art within a very short period of time. In 1829, at the sale of paintings belonging to Empress Josephine’s daughter, the Duchess of Saint-Leu (who owned a part of the Malmaison collection), a José Ribera was acquired for the Hermitage. Purchased in 1831 in Paris, at the sale of the picture gallery of Manuel de Godoy, Minister of Charles IV of Spain, were several works by Ribalta and Murillo, and the earliest of Ribera’s signed canvases,
In 1850, through the mediation of the Russian consul-general in Venice, Khvostov, the gallery of the Barbarigo Palace was acquired, adding to the Hermitage collection six of its eight Titians, among them
In the second half of the nineteenth century the rate of the Museum’s growth slowed down. Individual entries coming mainly from, or with, Russian collections (in 1886, for example, the Golitsyn Museum in Moscow contributed seventy-three pictures by Italian, Flemish, and Dutch artists) did not introduce any fundamental changes into the picture gallery or affect its general character. It was, however, at this time that the Museum received two world-famed masterpieces: