The Hermitage July 27, 2006

Julia met us at the hotel and we retraced yesterday’s steps to the center of town and Dvortsovaya Square which is bordered by the Hermitage Museum on one side and the old General Staff building on the other. The Hermitage Museum occupies five palaces as well as a wing of the General Staff building and has over three million exhibits including 16,000 paintings and 12,000 pieces of sculpture. The museum was founded in 1764 with the acquisition of its first group of paintings and amazingly survived the revolution in 1917 as well as the siege of Leningrad during WWII. During the Soviet years the museum actually grew except for a period in the 1930s when a number of its masterpieces were sold abroad. The late twentieth century brought better times and renovation to the museum and it now hosts thousands of visitors from all over the world every year.

The first thing that impressed us about the museum was the museum house itself. They are palaces for goodness sakes, and these palaces were the homes of the Russian Tsars and Tsarinas. I will let you in on a little secret; these people knew how to spend money. The buildings contain marble from Italy, gold and silver like there was an unending supply, semi precious stone to either build or encase columns, intricate parquet floors using exotic woods from around the world and enough chandeliers to light Chicago. They have managed also to hold onto or reacquire some of the furnishings which, as you would expect, follow the same grandiose if not sometime garish style exhibited in the buildings themselves.

The thought of trying to even get an overview of this collection in one day is overwhelming so Julia gave us the condensed “highlights of the highlights tour”. I have to say here that although Julia is a language major she is extremely knowledgeable about art and confessed one of her grandparents was an artist and another was an art critic. She said that she spent a lot of time looking at and hearing about art while she was growing up. It shows.

We started our visit touring the galleries that exhibit portraits of the royal families as well as highlights of the Winter Palace. We then moved through different rooms containing works by impressionist such as Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne, Van Gough, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso and these were just the names that I recognized. If that wasn’t enough we moved to another section that displayed works from the Italian Renaissance. The works of Michelangelo, Raphael and of course Da Vinci were displayed as well as other artists of the period. As tired and overwhelmed as we were we moved on to the collections of the Dutch Masters which is highlighted by numerous works of Rembrandt. This is the largest collection of Rembrandt work outside of Amsterdam.

As amazing as the Hermitage is we decided that it was time to leave. Julia left us at the Museum and headed for home and her two kids. We started back to the hotel looking for a cafe and a late lunch. Our stomachs and heads full we made our way to the hotel and a relaxing evening.