The Hermitage guide

The growth of this museum was indeed astonishingly rapid. Its very first printed catalogue, issued ten years after the collection was founded, listed 2,080 paintings, while only a decade later the picture gallery already contained 2,568 canvases. These works formed not a random assemblage of kunststücke, but a carefully selected collection which included most of the masterpieces that were to bring the Hermitage its world-wide fame. Much of Catherine II’s success in amassing the collection stems from the very circumstances surrounding the first acquisitions. In 1764 she received a consignment of two hundred and twenty-five pictures from the Berlin merchant Gotzkowsky, in payment of his debt to the Russian Treasury. These works, almost exclusively by Dutch and Flemish masters, had been collected for King Friedrich II of Prussia, who, owing to financial difficulties caused by the Seven Years War, was forced to give up the idea of buying them. Having almost unlimited financial resources at her disposal, the Russian empress spared no expense to enlarge her museum.

The rapid growth of the Hermitage in the first years of its existence was also partly due to the condition of the art market at the time. Large numbers of works of art were available for purchase, particularly in Paris, at auctions where treasures once owned by the now impoverished aristocracy were sold off. Agents of the Russian court would attend every sale which seemed to promise valuable acquisitions. It was at one such sale, for instance, that Murillo’s Boy with a Dog was bought. But the highest point was reached when Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son was acquired for the Hermitage.

Much more important for the Museum than the purchase of individual, though renowned canvases, was the acquisition of whole collections, amassed by connoisseurs or art lovers. The first of these was the collection of Heinrich Brühl, bought in 1769 from his heirs in Dresden. Count Brühl, the once omnipotent minister of Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had been entrusted with the task of acquiring art works for the Dresden picture gallery, and had accumulated an excellent collection of his own, containing paintings, drawings, and engravings. His collection was bought for the Empress, and formed the nucleus of the Hermitage section of Dutch and Flemish paintings, giving it four Rembrandts, four landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael, and two canvases by Rubens. Other schools were represented in the Brühl collection by single works only, but among these were such masterpieces as The Death of St Joseph by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Augustus by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and An Embarrassing Proposal by Antoine Watteau.

The Brühl collection of drawings also enriched the Hermitage, bringing to it 1,076 sheets by old and contemporary masters. Added to the 6,000 drawings composing the collection of the Austrian minister, Count Johann Philip Cobenzl, which had been acquired in 1768 in Brussels, they laid the foundation of the Department’s present section of drawings.

The most impressive was the purchase, in 1772, of one of the finest private collections in Paris, assembled by Pierre Crozat. It included such masterpieces as The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho by Lucas van Leyden, Judith by Giorgione, Pietà by Paolo Veronese, Bacchus by Rubens, Tavern Scene by Adriaen Brouwer and Danaë by Rembrandt. The Crozat collection, with its seven Rembrandts, eight Rubens, and several splendid portraits by Van Dyck, substantially enriched the Museum’s Flemish and Dutch sections. It also raised the standard of the Italian collection, adding to it works by Raphael, Tintoretto, and Fetti, while canvases by Nicolas Poussin, Louis Le Nain, Pierre Mignard, Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, Nicolas de Lar-gillière, and Siméon Chardin formed the basis of the Hermitage collection of French paintings.

Substantial additions came to the Hermitage in 1779 with the acquisition of the famous Houghton Hall collection. Accumulated by Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister under two successive monarchs, George I and George II, it numbered 198 paintings, including The Carters by Rubens, Bird Concert by Snyders, all of Van Dyck’s English portraits, four paintings by Salvator Rosa, and canvases by Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Guido Reni, Carlo Maratti, and other Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. The sale of the Walpole collection caused much public concern in England. The question was voiced in Parliament, and vain attempts were made to prevent its departure from the country after Count Moussine-Pushkin, Russian ambassador to London, had paid 36,000 pounds for it to Robert Walpole’s heirs.