The Hermitage guide

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. 1699—1779. France

Still Life with the Attributes of the Arts. 1766

146

François Boucher. 1703—1770. France

Pastoral Scene

147

Jean Goujon. С. 1510—1568. France

Venus and Cupid. Marble

148

Étienne-Maurice Falconet. 1716—1791. France

Flora. Marble. 1750

149

Jean-Antoine Houdon. 1741—1828. France

Voltaire. Marble. 1781

150

Eugène Delacroix. 1798—1863. France

Arab Saddling His Horse. 1855

151

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. 1780—1867. France

Portrait of Count Guryev. 1821

152

Claude Monet. 1840—1926. France

Lady in the Garden at Sainte-Adresse. 1867

153

Edouard Manet. 1832—1883. France

Portrait of Mme Jules Guillemet. 1880

154

Auguste Renoir. 1841—1919. France

Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary. 1878

155

Auguste Renoir. 1841—1919. France

Girl with a Fan. 1881

156

Edgar Degas. 1834—1917. France

Woman Combing Her Hair. 1885—86. Pastel

157

Auguste Rodin. 1840—1917. France

Eternal Spring. Marble. After 1884

158

Vincent van Gogh. 1853—1890. France

Ladies of Arles. 1888

159

Vincent van Gogh. 1853—1890. France

Cottages. 1890

160

Paul Gauguin. 1848—1903. France

Woman Holding a Fruit of Mango. 1893

161

Paul Cézanne. 1839—1906. France

The Smoker. C. 1895

162

Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France

The Dance. 1910

163

Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. 1913

164

Henri Matisse. 1869—1954. France

Venus in a Shell. Bronze. 1930

165

Pablo Picasso. 1881—1973. France

Three Women. 1908

166

Pablo Picasso. 1881—1973. France

Absinthe Drinker. 1901

167

Hans Grundig. 1901—1958. Germany

Summer Lightnings above the City. 1933

168

Renato Guttuso. Born 1912. Italy

Rocco and Son. 1960

169

André Fougeron. Born 1913. France

The Bridge. 1964

The Department of Russian Culture

The Department of Russian Culture is the youngest of the Hermitage’s specialist departments. Its formation was directly connected with the changes in the Museum’s policy effected after the October Revolution of 1917, when materials began to be assembled so as to illustrate not only the history of art, as before, but other essential aspects of man’s cultural heritage as well. Once the Oriental Department and the Department of Prehistoric Culture had been opened, the need for an exhibition reflecting the historical advance of the Russian people became increasingly evident, all the more so since the Hermitage would be able to present the history of Russian culture in the light of its interrelations with the cultural history of other peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union and many countries lying beyond its borders.

The Department was founded in 1941, when a large and valuable collection was transferred to the Hermitage from the History Department of the Ethnographical Museum of the Peoples of the USSR in Leningrad. This contained tens of thousands of items illustrating various aspects of Russian culture and art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and including, among others, numerous exhibits from the former Gallery of Peter the Great, created in the early eighteenth century. The remainder of this Gallery reached the Museum later, with the materials which arrived from the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, the Russian Museum, and Peter the Great’s Summer Palace (all in Leningrad), where they had been preserved after the dispersal of the Gallery.

In 1941 the Institute for the History of Science and Technology transferred to the Hermitage an exceptionally valuable collection of instruments and machine tools dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In 1949 the Department received from the Museum for the History of Artillery in Leningrad a unique collection of seventeenth- to twentieth-century Russian banners as well as many foreign ones taken as trophies in war; and in 1954 the Museum of the October Revolution in Leningrad presented the Hermitage with artistic and documentary material principally relating to the Decembrist Rebellion of 1825. Of particular interest among the accessions from other museums is a series of oil-paintings depicting the interiors of the Winter Palace (from the Palace Museum at Pavlovsk), and two collections of jewellery, one from the Central Reserve Store of Countryside Palace Museums, and the other from the State Repository in Moscow.

Over 3,500 objects of Russian applied art, more than 20,000 engravings and lithographs, and a large number of watercolours and pencil drawings came from other departments of the Hermitage where they had been assembled and preserved since the eighteenth century.