Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. 1699—1779. France
146
François Boucher. 1703—1770. France
147
Jean Goujon.
148
Étienne-Maurice Falconet. 1716—1791. France
149
Jean-Antoine Houdon. 1741—1828. France
150
Eugène Delacroix. 1798—1863. France
151
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. 1780—1867. France
152
Claude Monet. 1840—1926. France
153
Edouard Manet. 1832—1883. France
154
Auguste Renoir. 1841—1919. France
155
Auguste Renoir. 1841—1919. France
156
Edgar Degas. 1834—1917. France
157
Auguste Rodin. 1840—1917. France
158
Vincent van Gogh. 1853—1890. France
159
Vincent van Gogh. 1853—1890. France
160
Paul Gauguin. 1848—1903. France
161
Paul Cézanne. 1839—1906. France
162
Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France
163
Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France
164
Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France
165
Pablo Picasso. 1881—1973. France
166
Pablo Picasso. 1881—1973. France
167
Hans Grundig. 1901—1958. Germany
168
Renato Guttuso. Born 1912. Italy
169
André Fougeron. Born 1913. France
The Department of Russian Culture
The Department of Russian Culture is the youngest of the Hermitage’s specialist departments. Its formation was directly connected with the changes in the Museum’s policy effected after the October Revolution of 1917, when materials began to be assembled so as to illustrate not only the history of art, as before, but other essential aspects of man’s cultural heritage as well. Once the Oriental Department and the Department of Prehistoric Culture had been opened, the need for an exhibition reflecting the historical advance of the Russian people became increasingly evident, all the more so since the Hermitage would be able to present the history of Russian culture in the light of its interrelations with the cultural history of other peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union and many countries lying beyond its borders.
The Department was founded in 1941, when a large and valuable collection was transferred to the Hermitage from the History Department of the Ethnographical Museum of the Peoples of the USSR in Leningrad. This contained tens of thousands of items illustrating various aspects of Russian culture and art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and including, among others, numerous exhibits from the former Gallery of Peter the Great, created in the early eighteenth century. The remainder of this Gallery reached the Museum later, with the materials which arrived from the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, the Russian Museum, and Peter the Great’s Summer Palace (all in Leningrad), where they had been preserved after the dispersal of the Gallery.
In 1941 the Institute for the History of Science and Technology transferred to the Hermitage an exceptionally valuable collection of instruments and machine tools dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In 1949 the Department received from the Museum for the History of Artillery in Leningrad a unique collection of seventeenth- to twentieth-century Russian banners as well as many foreign ones taken as trophies in war; and in 1954 the Museum of the October Revolution in Leningrad presented the Hermitage with artistic and documentary material principally relating to the Decembrist Rebellion of 1825. Of particular interest among the accessions from other museums is a series of oil-paintings depicting the interiors of the Winter Palace (from the Palace Museum at Pavlovsk), and two collections of jewellery, one from the Central Reserve Store of Countryside Palace Museums, and the other from the State Repository in Moscow.
Over 3,500 objects of Russian applied art, more than 20,000 engravings and lithographs, and a large number of watercolours and pencil drawings came from other departments of the Hermitage where they had been assembled and preserved since the eighteenth century.