Western European Art in the Hermitage

The Department of Western European Art is the earliest in the Hermitage. Works by Western European masters became the first accessions that made up the core of the future art collections of the now famous museum. There were some first-rate examples of High Renaissance art. The art collections of Catherine the Great were preserved in the hall situated near the end of the long suite of rooms created by Yury Velten in the Old Hermitage. These interiors were not designed for a display of paintings and works of art were arranged on the walls of the palace with no system at all, just to gladden the eye. The interior acquired its present-day appearance in 1858, when the architect Andrei Stakenschneider redecorated the entire enfilade.

Today, the room is used to display the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. The celebrated Italian master practiced various kinds of art, but was not very prolific as a painter and, besides, more than a half of his creations disappeared.

Two of his few authentic surviving paintings, The Madonna with a Flower and The Madonna and Child, grace this beautiful interior.

Francisco de Surbaran The Childhood of the Madonna. Ca 1600

The Hermitage is considered to be the world's largest picture gallery. Its rich collections displayed in more than one hundred halls and rooms, as well as kept in the stocks amount to about 8,000 paintings of different Western European schools from the late Medieval Ages to the present day. One can enjoy here works by nearly all outstanding masters of Western Europe. A gem of these holdings is the superb collection of Spanish painting, perhaps the best outside Spain. It boasts works by all the great Spanish artists - El Greco, Ribera, Surbaran, Velazquez, Murillo and Goya. Its most valuable part consists of paintings by the foremost artists of the eighteenth century, which is reckoned to be the "Golden Age" of Spanish national culture.

Visitors to the museum are invariably attracted to the Hermitage's collection of Dutch painting, also one of the most representative in the world. Its highlight is an outstanding assemblage of paintings by the great Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669) complemented by his no less superb graphic works. Dutch paintings appeared in St Petersburg during the age of Peter the Great, long before the establishment of the Hermitage Museum. Rembrandt was one of the Tsar's favourite painters.

The most remarkable section of French art in the Hermitage is the collection of Impressionist paintings including works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne and other great masters. Their works are especially notable for the specific pictorial devices that were a result of a new world perception. It was the Impressionist group that "opened" this aspect of the world not noticed by artists before them, and turned to the changing and transitory in it expressing their personal impressions and moods and emphazing the value of fleeting moments.

The work of Henri Matisse, one of the leading masters of world painting, is represented in the Hermitage by a collection of about forty canvases. It contains still lifes, decorative panels, portraits and genre scenes. Matisse was the most significant artist of the Fauve group of painters. His point of departure was the thesis that verisimilitude was not truth. The artist keenly felt his material and a correlation of a drawing with the format of the paper and attached great significance to colour.

Henri Matisse. The Dance. 1910

Van Gogh and Gauguin, who evolved their own distinctive methods in painting, occupy a place apart next to the galaxy of the Impressionists. Paintings by Gauguin in the Hermitage collection belong to the period when the artist fled from stifling civilization to Tahiti Island and spent the rest of his life on islands in the Pacific trying to find harmony and calm there. Pastorales tabitiennes (Tahitian Pastorals) is one of the best works by Gauguin. The artist himself said that he wanted to convey in his paintings "the accord of human life with the life of animals and plants" and "to give more place to the voice of the earth".

Pablo Pikasso. Guitar and Violin

Similarly restless was the life of Gauguin's friend Vincent Van Gogh. Among his works in the Hermitage is the canvas Cottages painted during the year of the artist's death. It gives some idea of Van Gogh's last period. Infatuated with Oriental art, especially with the Japanese woodcut, he perceived the world "with Japanese eyes". His naturalness was a result of his utmost truthfulness. Van Gogh said about himself that he stands in art "precisely where he is in life itself. His methods later exerted a significant influence on the work of the European Expressionists. The Hermitage also owns a number of works by Wassily Kandinsky, the initiator of Abstract Expressionism and one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century.

A single tour of the rooms and halls of the Hermitage will allow you just to form a general idea of the character and scale of Russia's largest museum, its history, the architectural splendour of its halls and rooms and the endless variety of the collections displayed in them. The interiors of the Winter Palace and other Hermitage buildings created by the outstanding master craftsmen — builders, stone-carvers, moulders and guilders — are magnificent examples of Russian art in their own right. Besides permanent displays, the Hermitage arranges many temporal exhibitions, which are now held in the recently opened rooms of the General Staff building.

Wassily Kcmdinsky. Winter. 1909