The State Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum is one of the largest and oldest art and cultural-history museums in the world, located in the very heart of Saint Petersburg on Palace Embankment. Until 1917 it was known as the Imperial Hermitage. The main museum complex unites six interconnected buildings — the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old (Great) Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre and the Reserve House of the Winter Palace — where 365 rooms are open to visitors. The museum also owns the General Staff Building, the Menshikov Palace, the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory and the "Staraya Derevnya" Restoration and Storage Centre. The total area of the Hermitage buildings exceeds 233,000 square metres.

The museum's history began in 1764, when Empress Catherine II received from Berlin a collection of paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, acquired to settle the debt of the Berlin merchant Johann Gotzkowsky. The canvases were placed in secluded chambers of the Winter Palace, which came to be known by the French word "Hermitage" — a place of solitude. Over the following decades the empress acquired several major painting collections in Europe — those of Count Brühl, Baron Crozat, and the British prime minister Robert Walpole — giving Russia, for the first time, a gallery of world stature. The Hermitage became a public museum in 1852, when the specially built New Hermitage building opened to visitors; before that, access was granted only by personal permission.

Today the Hermitage collection numbers around three million works of art and cultural artifacts — from the Stone Age to the present day: paintings, drawings, sculpture, decorative and applied art, archaeological finds and coins. Among the gems of the collection are Leonardo da Vinci's "Benois Madonna," Titian's "Danaë," Rembrandt's "The Return of the Prodigal Son," and works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Poussin. During the Great Patriotic War the bulk of the collection was evacuated to the Urals, while the building itself became an air-raid shelter; not a single exhibit was lost. The State Hermitage consistently ranks among the ten most visited art museums in the world: in 2019 it was visited by nearly five million people.