The Hermitage guide

But perhaps the decisive factor in the formation of the Museum at its early stage was the contribution of outstanding eighteenth-century art experts. Catherine II succeeded in enlisting for her museum the services of the philosopher and art critic Dénis Diderot, the encyclopedist Melchior Grimm, the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet, and the collector François Tronchin. Yet one can hardly overestimate the role played in augmenting the stocks of the Hermitage by Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, one of the most enlightened men of his time and Russian ambassador to Paris and later The Hague. Suffice it to mention that the Crozat collection was bought on Golitsyn’s initiative, through the mediation of Diderot and Tronchin, and that it was thanks to Golitsyn that the Hermitage came into the possession of the Cobenzl collection, a number of paintings from the Jean de Jullienne collection, and many other pictures. Some of the Hermitage acquisitions had a rather peculiar history. Thus, for example, Landscape with Polyphemus by Poussin was purchased by Diderot from the Marquis de Conflans who, having gambled away a fortune, and being in desperate need of money, had offered the picture to Diderot.

Another factor which contributed to the growth of the Museum’s collections was the establishment of links with active contemporary artists. This helped the Hermitage obtain works by well-known masters of the second half of the eighteenth century: Still Life with the Attributes of the Arts by Chardin, which was brought to St Petersburg by Falconet, and paintings by François Boucher, Louis Michel van Loo, Joseph Marie Vien, Joshua Reynolds, Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raffaël Mengs, Jacob Philipp Hackaert, and Angelica Kauffmann.

Apart from the palace collection of the tsars, many large private collections came into being in Russia at that time. Although inferior to that of the Hermitage, they nevertheless often contained first-rate works of art. Some of them entered the Museum as far back as the late eighteenth century, following the death of their owners, such as the collection of Potiomkin-Tavrichesky, of Lanskoi — owner of the famous collection once formed by Count Baudoin, Friedrich’s court banker — and of Teplov; but most found their way into the Hermitage only after the October Revolution.

It should be pointed out, however, that the interest which Russian society evinced in art was not limited to painting alone. The imperial collection embraced diverse works of art, some housed in the Winter Palace, others in different town and country residencies, and was constantly enriched with specimens of Western European sculpture and applied arts. While objets d'art were used as a rule for the decoration of the palaces’ halls and private suites, sculptures, by contrast, were looked upon at that time as museum exhibits.

The acquisition, in 1785, of the Lyde Browne collection in England turned out to be especially fortunate. The collection, composed in Italy almost exclusively of relics of antique art, also contained some Western European sculptures. It was with the Lyde Browne collection that Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, his only work to be found in the Soviet Union, reached Russia. Originally intended for the Medici tomb in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, it was not included into the final plan of its decoration. The Lyde Browne collection was placed in the Grotto, a garden pavilion in Tsarskoye Selo, and was transferred to the Hermitage at the end of the nineteenth century. The Grotto also housed the famous statue of Voltaire. Catherine II for a long time kept up a lively correspondence with the celebrated French philosopher, and in 1781 commissioned a sculpture of him from Jean-Antoine Houdon. After Voltaire’s library was purchased and placed in the halls of the Winter Palace, the statue was installed there.

The superb collection of Abbot Filippo Farsetti, a patron of the arts from Venice, had travelled a long way before it reached the Museum. Its finest items were terra-cotta bozzetti (sketches and models) by Lorenzo Bernini and many other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian sculptors. After the Abbot’s death, the collection passed into the hands of his nephew, Antonio Farsetti, who was Knight Commander of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Malta. Desirous of strengthening his position in St Petersburg after his arrival there, Farsetti presented this collection to Paul I, recently elected Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta. On Paul’s instructions the sculptures were transferred to the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg where they remained until 1919 when the entire collection went to the Hermitage.