The Hermitage guide

In 1808 Franz Labensky, Keeper of the Hermitage picture gallery from 1797 to 1849, was fortunate enough to make several extremely valuable acquisitions in Paris, including Caravaggio’s Lute Player (previously part of the celebrated Justiniani collection), and some canvases by Dutch and French masters, particularly Pieter de Hooch and Philippe de Champagne. The Hermitage’s Italian section also benefited from the purchases made by Labensky in 1840—11 in Paris through the mediation of Vivant Denon, director of the Louvre, and by Adjutant General Trubetskoi in 1819 in Italy. These were paintings by Francesco Bassano, Carlo Maratti, and Carlo Dolci.

The major highlight in the history of the Museum in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the acquisition of the Malmaison collection of Empress Josephine, the first wife of Napoleon. Composed of the spoils of the Napoleonic wars (most of its paintings previously belonged to the famous Cassel Gallery), the Malmaison collection enriched the Hermitage with 118 canvases by Dutch, Flemish, and French artists, including Rembrandt, Rubens, Claude Lorrain (his Times of Day series), Gerard Terborch, Gabriel Metsu, and David Teniers. Also included in the collection were several noteworthy samples of French sculpture of the Napoleonic period by Denis Antoine Chaudet, François Joseph Bozio, and some works by Antonio Canova.

In 1814—15 the Amsterdam collection of the English banker Coesvelt was bought. Its main attraction were the pictures of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish school hitherto represented in the Museum only by a few Murillos. The Coesvelt collection brought in paintings by almost all major Spanish masters, including Francisco Zurbaran, Francisco Ribalta, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Antonio Pereda, and Diego Velazquez.

The interest in Spanish painting which marked the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and the availability on the art market of a considerable number of Spanish pictures, enabled the Hermitage to enlarge its section of Spanish art within a very short period of time. In 1829, at the sale of paintings belonging to Empress Josephine’s daughter, the Duchess of Saint-Leu (who owned a part of the Malmaison collection), a José Ribera was acquired for the Hermitage. Purchased in 1831 in Paris, at the sale of the picture gallery of Manuel de Godoy, Minister of Charles IV of Spain, were several works by Ribalta and Murillo, and the earliest of Ribera’s signed canvases, St Jerome Listening to the Sound of the Trumpet. In 1834 the Museum’s Spanish section was augmented by paintings from the collection of General Gessler, Russian consul-general in Cadiz, and Paez de la Cadena, Spanish ambassador to St Petersburg. In 1845 the Russian diplomat Dmitry Tatishchev bequeathed to the Hermitage his collection of pictures, amassed in Italy, Spain, and Austria, which included Madonna and Child by Morales. And, finally, in 1852 Zurbaran’s St Lawrence bought at the sale of the Marshal Soult collection in Paris, found its way to St Petersburg.

In 1850, through the mediation of the Russian consul-general in Venice, Khvostov, the gallery of the Barbarigo Palace was acquired, adding to the Hermitage collection six of its eight Titians, among them St Sebastian. In the same year Fiodor Bruni, Keeper of the Hermitage picture gallery, attended the sale of the King Willem II’s collection in The Hague, where he bought a number of canvases by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish masters who had hitherto been represented in the Museum by single works only. Among the new entries was St Luke Drawing a Portrait oj the Virgin by Rogier van der Weyden, actually half of a panel once sawn in two. The panel was restored in 1884 when, by a fortunate coincidence, its other half also reached the Hermitage.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the rate of the Museum’s growth slowed down. Individual entries coming mainly from, or with, Russian collections (in 1886, for example, the Golitsyn Museum in Moscow contributed seventy-three pictures by Italian, Flemish, and Dutch artists) did not introduce any fundamental changes into the picture gallery or affect its general character. It was, however, at this time that the Museum received two world-famed masterpieces: The Litta Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci, bought in 1866 from the Duke of Litta in Milan, and The Conestabile Madonna, an exceptionally rare work of the seventeen-year-old Raphael, purchased in 1870 from Count Conestabile in Perugia. Raphael’s masterpiece, though, did not immediately find its way to the Hermitage; it was presented by Alexander II to the Empress and graced her apartments in the Winter Palace up to 1880.