The Hermitage guide

The growth of the collection of Western European sculpture in the mid-nineteenth century was connected with the erection of the New Hermitage. The first floor of the new building was intended from the start to accommodate a picture gallery, and neither its architectural design, nor its decorative finish would admit of a lavish use of furniture, tapestries, porcelains, and other objects of applied art. such as generally adorn palatial halls. The exhibition rooms of the New Hermitage were therefore decorated with sculptures brought from urban and country palaces and parks, where they had been accumulated since the eighteenth century. In addition, a number of works by contemporary scupltors were bought — Lorenzo Bartolini, Giovanni Duprè, Christian Daniel Rauch, Emil Wolf, and others — works which today increasingly attract the attention of scholars. In the following years the section of Western European sculpture benefited considerably from the acquisition of the Demidov and Laval collections.

A very significant event in the history of the Department of Western European Art took place in 1885. It was the establishment of its medieval and Renaissance sections. The collections which comprised these sections incorporated a sizable stock of objects deriving from a variety of sources. Thus, the splendid silver monstrance, a fifteenth-century work by Hans Rissenberger of Tallinn, especially interesting because it was signed, came from the St Petersburg Kunstkammer or Cabinet of Curios, where it had been kept since 1725. The collection of arms and armour, as well as a part of the above-mentioned Tatishchev collection that included some early stained glass panels, arrived from the Arsenal at Tsarskoye Selo, where it had been housed since 1811. But the nucleus of the new section was formed by the remarkable collection of sculpture and objects of applied art from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, built up by the Russian merchant Basilewsky in Paris in the 1760s and 70s and purchased for the Hermitage in 1884. A subtle connoisseur of art, whose enormous fortune enabled him to indulge freely in his passion for collecting, Basilewsky relied in his choice of art objects not only on his own erudition and taste but also on the opinion of the foremost experts of the age. His collection was distinguished for its exceptionally high artistic standard, and was justly regarded as an assemblage of masterpieces. It contained a great variety of bone carvings and metalwork — including the silver figure of St Etienne as a Deacon and the magnificent Freiburg Cross — painted and champlevé enamels, Hispano-Moresque and Italian majolicas (the famous Fortuni vase and the plate by Nicolò Pellipario), Venetian glass, French faiences, and many other things illustrative of practically every branch of applied art and artistic crafts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Basilewsky collection was equally rich in Italian, German, and Netherlandish sculpture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, among which the figure of the Mourner by Jean de Cambrai, the Netherlandish sculptor of the early fifteenth century, stands out by its wonderful expressiveness. And, finally, the Golitsyn Museum collection of twelfth- to sixteenth-century applied art entered the Hermitage, making its collection one of the best in the world.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Hermitage picture gallery was headed by two well-known Russian art historians, Ernest von Liphart and James Schmidt. They were able to make some quite valuable acquisitions and to enliven the work of the Museum so substantially that this could not fail to attract the public eye. Art collectors began to donate or bequeath their pictures to the Hermitage. That was how El Greco’s St Peter and St Paul came to the Museum from the Durnovo collection, and the famous eighteenth-century English portraits, among them Gainsborough’s Lady in Blue, from the Khitrovo collection. Of great value for the enlargement of the gallery’s Italian section was the acquisition, in 1911, of several pictures from Grigory Stroganov’s Roman collection, including the Madonna from the Annunciation by Simone Martini, an excellent specimen of Italian art in the first half of the fourteenth century, and several canvases from Paul Stroganov’s St Petersburg collection.

Liphart and Schmidt were also instrumental in obtaining for the Museum the collection of Semionov-Tien-Shansky, the celebrated Russian traveller and scholar. This collection, highly renowned among connoisseurs of art, brought in nearly seven hundred pictures by Flemish and Dutch masters, making the Hermitage one of the world’s most important and comprehensive repositories of Flemish and Dutch painting.