Hermitage Museum

The Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is one of the largest art galleries and antiquities museums in the world. It occupies a complex of six buildings on the banks of the River Neva, the most important of which is the Winter Palace, the official residence of the former tsars. The museum grew out of the private collection the tsars built up over several centuries and was not declared a state museum until 1917. Its holdings now exceed three million objects, ranging from Greek and Roman antiquities to painting and sculpture from Western Europe, Eastern art, Russian art, archaeology, jewellery and weapons. Its picture gallery is regarded as one of the most complete in the world.

The collection is closely tied to the history of the Winter Palace. Catherine the Great, who made it her residence, acquired many collections during the eighteenth century, including those of Brühl, Crozat, Walpole and Baudouin, with works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Murillo and van Dyck. The nineteenth century brought further major purchases, such as the collection of Empress Josephine and Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna Litta, and in 1852 the new museum building opened to the public. After the Russian Revolution it became a state museum, and it lost works through sales abroad in the 1930s. During the Second World War much of its collection was evacuated to the Urals while the city endured the German siege.

Among its best-known paintings are Leonardo da Vinci's Benois Madonna and Madonna Litta, Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son, Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Dress Woman and Henri Matisse's Music. The collection also holds works by Titian, Raphael and Giorgione, along with a notable group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Van Gogh, Monet and Gauguin. Among the artists most represented in its online catalogue are George Dawe, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet.