Hermitage Museum

The museum dates itself to 1764, when Catherine the Great acquired a collection of Dutch and Flemish pictures assembled by the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky for Frederick II of Prussia, who refused it after losing the Seven Years' War; Russian accounts call the transfer settlement of Gotzkowsky's debt to the crown. Accounts differ on whether 225 or 317 paintings changed hands. They included thirteen Rembrandts and Frans Hals's Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove.

Catherine kept buying: Heinrich von Brühl's 600-odd paintings in Saxony in 1769, Pierre Crozat's in Paris in 1772, and 198 pictures from Robert Walpole's collection in London in 1779. Yury Felten extended the Winter Palace eastwards from 1764 and Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe added the Northern Pavilion by 1769; linked by galleries, they became the Small Hermitage, and Felten's larger extension, the Old Hermitage, was finished in 1787. The name then meant the tsars' private apartments, and few outsiders saw the pictures.

Nicholas I commissioned the German architect Leo von Klenze in 1838 to design a building for a public museum; the Shepelev Palace and the royal stables were demolished to make room, and Vasily Stasov and Nikolai Yefimov oversaw the work from 1842 to 1851. The New Hermitage opened to the public on 5 February 1852. The purchases continued: part of the papal government's Campana collection, mostly classical antiquities, in 1861, Alexander Basilewski's medieval and Renaissance holdings in 1884, and Leonardo's Benois Madonna in 1914.

After the revolution of 1917 the Imperial Hermitage and the Winter Palace were proclaimed state museums and eventually merged, taking in nationalised collections from the Stroganov, Yusupov and Catherine palaces. In 1928 the Soviet government ordered the museum to compile a list of works for export, and from 1930 to 1934 over two thousand were sold clandestinely abroad, among them Raphael's Alba Madonna and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. Andrew W. Mellon bought twenty-one in 1931 and gave them to found the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

During the Great Purge of the later 1930s the NKVD investigated the museum's staff for anti-Soviet activity. Those with links to the pre-revolutionary aristocracy were sent into internal exile as socially dangerous persons, a few to labour camps. The Oriental Department was investigated hardest: under torture Dmitry Zhukov denounced Nikolai Nevsky as a member of a Japanese spy ring, and both men were executed in November 1938.

With the German invasion of 1941, two trains carried a large part of the collection east to Sverdlovsk before the siege of Leningrad closed in; the cellars became air-raid shelters, and two bombs and several shells struck the buildings. An exhibition opened in November 1944, the evacuated collections returned in October 1945 and the museum reopened that November. In 1948, 316 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and modern works came from Moscow's Museum of New Western Art, largely the nationalised Shchukin and Morozov collections. Trophy art from Berlin museums, the Pergamon Altar among it, was shown in 1954 and returned to Berlin in 1958.

On 15 June 1985 a man later judged insane threw sulphuric acid over Rembrandt's Danaë and cut the canvas twice with a knife. Conservators completed the restoration by 1997 and the painting went back on show behind armoured glass.

Mikhail Piotrovsky has directed the museum since July 1992. In October 1994 it announced that it had secretly held Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings taken in Germany in 1945; seventy-four were shown from 30 March 1995 in the Nicholas Hall as Hidden Treasures Revealed. The government granted the eastern wing of the General Staff Building on Palace Square in 1993, its exhibition rooms opening in 1999. In July 2006 it announced the theft of 221 small items — jewellery, icons, silverware and enamels — worth about US$543,000, several recovered by the end of that year.

The Hermitage is federal state property and a federal cultural heritage site. Five of the six buildings in the main complex — the Winter Palace, the Small, Old and New Hermitages and the Hermitage Theatre — are open to visitors, and foreign tourists pay more than citizens of Russia and Belarus. It recorded 1,649,443 visitors in 2021. On 23 June 2022 it imposed a year-long moratorium on exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and in March 2025 replaced fixed free-admission days with free days on public holidays.