Catherine the Great bought 225 paintings and founded a hermitage
In 1764 the Russian empress purchased a Berlin dealer's Western pictures and tucked them into private Winter Palace apartments meant as a refuge from court. That royal hideaway grew into Saint Petersburg's State Hermitage—now holding the world's largest painting collection across more than three million objects.
The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg began when Catherine the Great acquired paintings from Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky in 1764; the house marks the anniversary each 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It opened to the public in 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked it tenth among art museums with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022. Only a fraction of more than three million items—about a third of them coins—appears on permanent display. A cluster of six period structures on the Palace Embankment—Winter Palace among them—anchors the complex, with Menshikov Palace, a porcelain museum, Staraya Derevnya storage, and the General Staff Building's eastern wing also attached. Federal property since July 1992 under director Mikhail Piotrovsky, it charges foreigners more than Russian and Belarusian citizens, offers free entry the third Thursday monthly and daily free access for students and children, and closes Mondays.
"Hermitage" once meant a recluse's dwelling. The name clung to the tsars' private Winter Palace suites—retreats for intimate friends away from ceremony—and the museum began as the imperial family's personal collection. Catherine used those rooms for salons and seeded the holdings with 225 Western European paintings. Five of the six main structures welcome the public: the former imperial residence, plus the Small, Old, and New Hermitages and the Hermitage Theatre. Classical antiquities fill ground floors designed by Leo von Klenze in Greek Revival style in the early 1850s. Highlights include the Gonzaga Cameo, the Tauride Venus (now argued as Hellenistic original rather than Roman copy), and the 2.57-meter, 19-tonne Kolyvan jasper vase installed in 1843 before the walls rose.
Prehistoric galleries hold Altai nomad finds from Pazyryk and Bashadar, among them a knotted-pile carpet claimed as the oldest still intact anywhere, plus a wooden chariot from the fourth–third centuries BC. Treasure rooms show Scythian and Sarmatian gold. Pavilion Hall, by Andrei Stackenschneider in 1858, displays James Cox's eighteenth-century Peacock Clock. Italian Renaissance rooms include works tied to Leonardo's circle (Benois Madonna, Madonna Litta) and Raphael; Dutch and Flemish strengths feature Van Dyck, Rubens, and Rembrandt. An Egyptian hall on the Winter Palace ground floor has held that collection since 1940. From private refuge to federal museum, the Hermitage still wears its imperial architecture like a second skin.
Source: Hermitage Museum
