On 7 October 2017 the fifteenth exhibition will open in the Hermitage-Amsterdam Centre, a large-scale display of “Dutch Masters from the Hermitage”. It comprises 63 works by 50 artists from the State Hermitage’s collection of Dutch paintings. The core of the display consists of masterpieces by artists of Holland's Golden Age. This is the first time that the works of Dutch artists from the Hermitage’s celebrated collection will be presented in such numbers in their homeland.

Nicolaes Berchem
The Annunciation to the Shepherds. 1649
oil on canvas

Willem Kalf
Dessert. 1653–54
oil on canvas

Dirck Jacobsz
Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation. 1561
oil on panel

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
Flora. 1634
oil on canvas

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
Old Man in Red. 1652–54
oil on canvas

Dirck van Baburen
concert. 1623
oil on canvas

Paulus Potter
Punishment of a Hunter. OK. 1647
oil on panel

Gerard Terborch
Glass of Lemonade a. 1660–70
oil on canvas

Jacob van Ruisdael
March. 1660s
oil on canvas

The Hermitage’s collection of Dutch paintings numbers among the largest in the world and is the most significant outside of the Netherlands. It contains more than 1,500 works with the oeuvres of practically all the famous artists of the 17th century represented. The formation of such a collection on the banks of the Neva is undoubtedly bound up with the special attitude towards the culture of Holland that existed in Russian society. The origins of the collection go back to the time of Peter the Great. Even before the creation of the Hermitage, that Russian monarch gave orders for the purchase of Dutch paintings. It was for Peter that the first Rembrandt that would later adorn the Hermitage was bought – David and Jonathan, painted in 1642. The main corpus of the Hermitage's masterpieces came into being as the result of the many purchases made by Empress Catherine II's agents in Western Europe between 1763 and 1789. On her instructions, both individual works and whole art galleries were acquired. Her expert advisers were people who had a splendid understanding of artistic matters – Denis Diderot, Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Prince Dmitry Golitsyn.

In 1764 the collection assembled by Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky came into Catherine's possession. It contained several works in the present exhibition: Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man (before 1660), Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam (1666) and Dirck van Baburen’s Concert (1623). In 1768 Count Heinrich von Brühl collection was delivered to St Petersburg. It brought in the Portrait of a Scholar (1631) and Portrait of an Old Man in Red (1652–54), both by Rembrandt, and a rare work for a museum collection – the Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation painted in 1561 by Dirck Jacobsz (c. 1497–1567). In 1772 a sensation was caused in Paris by the purchase of the paintings in the collection of Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers, the finest in France. It contained works of the very highest standard, including such Rembrandt masterpieces as Danaë (1636) and The Holy Family (1645). The same collection was also the source of the earliest work in the exhibition – the triptych The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho (1531) by the Netherlandish painter and engraver Lucas van Leyden (1489/94–1553). In 1779 the collection assembled by Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, came into the Hermitage. The next acquisition that enriched the stock of Dutch painting was the art gallery of Count Baudouin, which contributed, for example, Rembrandt’s Young Woman with Earrings (1657). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the collecting activities continued. One of the most important additions to the museum was the collection of the scholar and geographer Piotr Semenov-Tian-Shansky, who had acquired more than 700 works of the Dutch and Flemish schools.

The 17th-century heyday of Dutch painting is represented in the Hermitage with exhaustive fullness.
The Hermitage's collection of paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), one of the very greatest Dutch artists, is among the museum's chief treasures. The museum presents all periods in his career, from the very earliest works to those produced in the last year of his life. Six of Rembrandt’s paintings, including Flora (1634), Portrait of a Scholar (1631), Young Woman with Earrings (1657) and Old Man in Red (1652–54) are included in the present exhibition in Amsterdam.

Frans Hals (1581–1666) was an outstanding 17th-century Dutch portrait painter. The Hermitage can boast two superb male portraits by him: Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Glove (c. 1650) and Portrait of a Man (before 1660). The latter, dating from the artist's late period, is on show in Amsterdam.

The display includes works by leading artists in a variety of genres that became common in Dutch 17th-century art.
Pieter Lastman (1583–1633) became head of the Amsterdam school of history painting in the early 1600s. The exhibition includes one of his earliest and best works – Abraham on the Road to Canaan (1614).

Genre painting depicting scenes of everyday life was particularly popular in Holland. The pictures by artists working in this field are of no great size (hence the term “Small Dutch Masters”) and were intended to adorn the rooms in the houses of wealthier burghers.

One of the most striking talents among the Small Dutch Masters is Jan Steen (1625/26–1679). His works are notable for their entertaining quality and anecdotal content. The exhibition includes this artist's Tric-Trac Players (1667). Another major exponent of this tendency, the founder of the “peasant genre”, was Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), who is represented by the exquisite composition Baker (c. 1650).

The cozy atmosphere of Dutch urban life and the untroubled world of the burghers is reflected in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch (1629 – after 1684) and Pieter Janssens Elinga (1623–1682).

Elegance and refinement are the marks of the works by Gerard Terborch (1617–1681), including one of the artist’s best-known pictures – Glass of Lemonade (1660–70).

The exhibition includes works by some of the foremost masters of landscape painting: Winter Scene near The Hague by Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), Marsh by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29–1682) and Frozen Lake by Isaak van Ostade (1621 –1649).
The Dutch still life is represented in compositions by Willem Claesz Heda (1594 – between 1680 and 1682) and Willem Kalf (1619–1693).

The Hermitage possesses several paintings by Paulus Potter (1625–1654), one of the greatest animal painters in 17th-century European art. They include Punishment of a Hunter (c. 1647) that appears in the present exhibition.

Specially for the exhibition the Hermitage has restored a canvas by one of the foremost Dutch artists of the second half of the 17th century – Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613–1670). His Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam (1666) combines a still life with genre motifs and an urban landscape.

A separate section of the display is made up of seven large grand vases with “picture painting” from the collection of the State Hermitage. These impressively-sized pieces were created at the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg in the second quarter of the 19th century. “Picture painting” is a term used to describe polychrome decoration on porcelain reproducing easel paintings by Old Masters, with the Small Dutch Masters being most often chosen for this purpose. The originals chosen were among the best works in the Hermitage picture gallery and also other prominent collections. In the history of Russian porcelain the grand vases decorated with such hand-painted copies represents the peak of the “Nicholas I Empire” style of the late 1820s–1840s. Outstanding among these pieces are the paired vases carrying reproductions of scenes from Paulus Potter's Punishment of a Hunter. This unique porcelain ensemble was presented to Emperor Nicholas I at Christmas 1830. Monumental vases were always allotted places of the greatest honor in the decoration of the apartments in the Winter Palace and other imperial residences, grand ducal palaces and the homes of the high aristocracy.

The exhibition curator of Dutch Masters from the Hermitage is Irina Alexeyevna Sokolova, Doctor of Culturology, chief researcher in the Department of Western European Fine Art, Keeper of Dutch Paintings.

A scholarly illustrated catalog has been produced for the exhibition in Dutch and English (Publisher: Joint Projects Foundation De Nieuwe Kerk - Hermitage Amsterdam, 2017).

The catalog has a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage “The Dutchmen who live in the Hermitage” and an introduction by Cathelijne Broers, Director of the Hermitage–Amsterdam Exhibition Centre.

The texts are by Irina Sokolova, Doctor of Culturology, Keeper of Dutch Paintings in the Hermitage (“The Collection of Dutch Paintings in the State Hermitage. A View from the 21st Century”) and Irina Bagdasarova, Candidate of Art Studies, Keeper of Russian Porcelain in the State Hermitage (“Vases with “picture painting” from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the second quarter of the 19th century”).

dutch painting household genre

The State Hermitage has one of the world's largest collections of Dutch paintings. Its first exhibits appeared on the banks of the Neva in 1716, long before the museum was founded. This year, Osip Solovyov bought one hundred and twenty-one paintings for Peter I in Holland, and after that, Yuri Kologrivov bought another one hundred and seventeen paintings in Brussels and Antwerp. A little later this collection was joined by one hundred and nineteen works sent to the king by the English merchants Zvan and Elseiom. Dutch paintings, along with Flemish ones, prevailed here: according to the biographer of Peter I, Jacob Shtelin, the tsar's favorite artists were Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Steen, Wauwerman, Brueghel, van der Werf and van Ostade, and his favorite subjects were scenes from life " Dutch men and women. This commitment to all things Dutch should not be seen as merely the personal taste of "Skipper Peter", as Peter was called during his stay in Holland. Dutch burgher democratism, which found a vivid expression in national painting, was especially close to the nature of democratic transformations in Russia at that time in the field of culture and life. But, of course, not only artistic interest was awakened in the Russian audience by the paintings of the Dutch painters. The works of such masters as the tsar's favorite seascape painter Adam Silo satisfied, first of all, the cognitive interest of the young Russian nation going out to sea. The Peter's collection of the Dutch already included such masterpieces as Rembrandt's "David and Jonathan" - the first work of a brilliant painter that came to Russia.

In the second half of the 18th century, many significant works of Dutch painting migrated to St. Petersburg. As part of the collection of G. Bruhl, acquired in Dresden (in 1769), the Hermitage received four portraits by Rembrandt, four landscapes by J. Ruisdael, paintings by G. Terborch, F. Miris, A. van Ostade, A. Wauwermann and others. The Crozat collection in Paris, received in 1772, brought to the museum such Rembrandt masterpieces as Danae and The Holy Family.

The collections of Baudouin (Paris), Walpole (England) and the first wife of Napoleon I, Empress Josephine, acquired for the Hermitage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, further enriched the Hermitage collection of the Dutch. The Hermitage was then able to include in its exposition "The Sacrifice of Abraham", "Descent from the Cross" and a dozen other canvases by Rembrandt, the work of H. Dow, fashionable in the 18th century, three of the best paintings by P. Potter (among them the masterpiece of the master - "The Farm"), " A glass of lemonade” by G. Terborch, “Breakfast” by G. Metsu, two amazingly delicate executions of flower still lifes by J. van Huysum and many other no less significant works.

An entertaining plot, small size and relatively low prices made Dutch paintings accessible to a large circle of Russian collectors. They were acquired not only by members of the royal house and the highest St. Petersburg nobility, but also by representatives of more democratic circles of the population. These collections will subsequently become the main source of replenishment of the Hermitage collection. So, in 1915, the museum received a huge collection of “small Dutchmen” acquired in 1910 by the famous Russian scientist and traveler P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, who collected seven hundred and nineteen paintings by three hundred and forty authors. With this collection, one hundred and ninety new names appeared in the museum's catalogue. Thus, if earlier the Dutch collection of the Hermitage stood out among other museums in the world by the number of masterpieces, now it has taken one of the first places in terms of the number of names represented in it, including the rarest ones.

After the Great October Socialist Revolution, on the basis of this collection, an unprecedented special reserve fund was created for the study of Dutch art. Significantly grown during the first years of Soviet power, when the collections of the nobility who fled abroad were nationalized, this fund is replenished even today through the Hermitage Purchasing Commission. So, only in recent years, the museum has received outstanding works by A. Blumart, J. Both, A. van Ostade, K. Berchem and other less prominent, but interesting for the history of the Dutch school of masters.

The best works from this collection are exhibited in the seven large halls of the New Hermitage (248-254) and the long Petrovsky Gallery (rooms 255-257).

Holland XVII gave the world a constellation of great artists unprecedented in world history. This was not before. It didn't happen AFTER. Unthinkable brilliant Rembrandt. He is the first in a number of Dutch artists, also because of his super-technique, super-painting. To do this, you should look at the London Bathing Woman, or the Hermitage Flora (and I do not touch on the topic of the most Christian humanism, the most subtle psychologism, amazing invention, the deepest self-reflection, the experience of oneself as another). From my point of view, and indeed objectively, Rembrandt is the number one artist in the history of mankind. Vermeer with his plein air, pure color, mystical silence. F. Hals with his riot of lace, grin. Terborch with its vibes, fabric textures and semi-darkness. Metsu with its kind of eternally unattached, but everywhere breaking through and stupid absolute picturesqueness. Gobbema with its some special rhythm, some very special inscription of man in nature. J. Ruisdal with his kind of naive monumentality, some kind of special ability to recognize a battle arena in a place, a very strange penchant for ornamentality. Potter, with his photographic fidelity and perpetually out of place physiological details. Hoch (pre-aristocratic) with his puppets-idols and bizarre experiments in home material geometry. I can list many more artists no less significant and masterful - Ner, Berchem, Peynaker, Miris, Kalf, Beyeren, Heda, Ast, Witte, Dow, Fabricius, Mas, Hogstraten, Gelder, Flink, Wauwermann, Goyen, Sten, Helst and etc. etc. But even in this "small" series there is a very small number of artists. I call them "quiet" for myself. All of them were influenced by Pieter de Hooch. They painted silence. They were very skilled. Not all of them are in the Hermitage. But their works in the Hermitage can be considered among the most important. Listen to them.
Jacob Wrel
Hermitage

From other museums












Isaiah Burse
Hermitage

Art

95144

Someone calculated that it would take eight years to walk around the entire Hermitage, devoting only a minute to inspecting each exhibit. So, going for new aesthetic impressions to one of the main museums of the country, you need to stock up on enough time and the appropriate mood.

The main museum of the Hermitage is a collection of five buildings built at different times by different architects for different purposes, and connected in series with each other, but visually different in color of the facades (this can be seen especially well from the spit of Vasilyevsky Island): the Winter Palace is the creation of Bartalameo Rastrelli, commissioned by Empress Elizabeth, then comes the Small Hermitage, then the suite of rooms of the Old Hermitage (the former living quarters of the imperial family), smoothly flowing into the building of the New Hermitage (designed by the European "museum" architect Leo von Klenze to accommodate the rapidly growing collection) and the Hermitage theater.

Must-see masterpieces are marked on the museum plan with arrows and pictures - in principle, this is the traditional route of most guides and tourists.

Below is the optimal list of Hermitage must sees.

The classic excursion route around the main Hermitage Museum starts from the Jordan Staircase, or, as it is also commonly called, the Ambassador Staircase (it was through this staircase that noble guests of emperors and envoys of foreign powers passed to the palace). After the white-and-gold marble staircase, the road forks: a suite of state rooms goes forward and into the distance, to the left - the Field Marshal's Hall. The ceremonial halls stretching along the Neva look somewhat deserted and are now used to host temporary exhibitions. On the left, the second suite of ceremonial halls begins, resting on the Throne Room, which, in contrast to the main staircase, looks rather modest.

Part of the first floor, which can be reached by descending the October Staircase (straight from the Impressionists), is dedicated to the art of the ancient inhabitants of Asia - the Scythians. Hall number 26 presents rather well-preserved items made of organic material found during excavations of the royal necropolis in the Altai Mountains, the so-called fifth Pazyryk burial mound. The Pazyryk culture dates back to the 6th-3rd centuries. BC e. ‒ the era of the early Iron Age. All the items found were preserved in excellent condition due to the special climatic conditions – an ice lens formed around the mound, resulting in a kind of “natural refrigerator” in which items can be stored for a very long period. Archaeologists discovered a burial chamber, which was a four-meter-high wooden frame, inside of which were placed the mummified bodies of a man and a woman, as well as a horse burial located outside the frame. Items found during excavations indicate the high social status of the buried. In ancient times, the mound was robbed, but the horse burial remained untouched. The wagon was found disassembled, presumably, it was harnessed by four horses. A special pride of the collection is a well-preserved felt carpet depicting a fantastic flower, a male rider and a larger woman, apparently a deity. Archaeologists have not come to a consensus as to when and why this carpet was made, detailed studies have shown that it was subsequently added, perhaps specifically for burial. Other interesting exhibits located in the window opposite are felt figurines of swans stuffed with reindeer fur. Swans have foreign black wings, presumably they were taken from vultures (funeral birds). Thus, the ancients endowed the swan with the property of transcendence, turning it into an inhabitant of all three levels of the universe: heavenly, earthly and watery. In total, four felt figurines of birds were found, which suggests that the swans were related to the wagon in which they were supposed to take the souls of the dead to the afterlife (during excavations, swans were found between the wagon and the carpet). “Imported finds” were also found in the barrow, for example, horse saddlecloths trimmed with Iranian woolen fabric and fabric from China, which allows us to speak about the contacts of the Scythian population of the Altai Mountains with the cultures of Central Asia and the Ancient East as early as the 6th-3rd centuries. BC e.

Main Museum Complex, Winter Palace, II floor, rooms 151, 153

If you are a little tired of the variety of paintings and sculptures, you can digress a bit by switching to a small room of French art of the 15th-17th centuries, where ceramics by Saint-Porcher and Bernard Palissy are displayed. There are only about 70 pieces of Saint-Porcher around the world, and in the Hermitage you can see as many as four copies. The Saint-Porcher technique (named after the supposed place of origin) can be schematically described as follows: ordinary clay was placed in molds, and then an ornament was squeezed out with metal matrices on the molds (there are as many ornaments as there are matrices), then the recesses were filled with clay of a contrasting color, the product was covered with transparent glaze and fired in a kiln. After firing, decorative painting was added. As you can see, as a result of such an intricate and laborious process, an extremely elegant and fragile little thing was obtained. In the showcase opposite, another type of ceramics is presented - ceramics of the circle of Bernard Palissy - the most famous master ceramist of the 16th century. Colorful, unusual, so-called "rural clays" are immediately striking - dishes depicting the inhabitants of the water element. The technique of making these dishes is still a mystery, but art historians believe that they were made using casts from prints. It was as if a stuffed sea reptile was smeared with fat, and a piece of clay was placed on top and burned. An effigy was pulled out of the burnt clay and an impression was made. There is an opinion that the reptiles, during the time when clay was applied to them, were only immobilized by the ether, but by no means dead. Casts were made from the resulting impression, which were attached to dishes, everything was painted with colored glaze, then covered with transparent and fired. The dishes of Bernard Palissy were so popular that he had a myriad of followers and imitators.

Main Museum Complex, Winter Palace, II floor, rooms 272‒292

If you walk through the enfilade of front rooms along the Neva, you will find yourself on the spare half of the rooms with residential interiors - here you can find strictly classical interiors, and living rooms decorated in the style of historicism, and rococo-intricate furniture, and Art Deco furniture, and Gothic wooden furniture. a two-tier library of Nicholas II with ancient folios, easily immersing you in the atmosphere of the Middle Ages.

Main Museum Complex, Winter Palace, II floor, rooms 187–176

Few people get to the third floor, to the department of the countries of the East. If you go a little further from the world of Matisse-Picasso-Derain, overcoming the temptation to go down the wooden stairs, then you will find yourself in the department of the countries of the East. In several halls of the Far East and Central Asia exposition, there are wall frescoes, partly lost, partly restored with the help of computer technology, which are more than one hundred years old. They represent the incredibly refined art of painting cave and ground Buddhist temples from the Karashar, Turfan and Kuchar oases, located along the route of the Great Silk Road. The frescoes serve as a unique evidence of the unity of the Buddhist world in India, Central Asia and China of the pre-Mongolian period. A few years ago, some of the frescoes from the collection were moved to the Staraya Derevnya conservation and storage center, where they are now on display.

Main Museum Complex, Winter Palace, 3rd floor, halls 359‒367, exposition "Culture and Art of Central Asia"

Impressionist works (Monet, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Pizarro) are presented on the third floor of the Winter Palace. One of the true gems of the collection is Claude Monet's Lady in the Garden of Sainte-Adresse (Claude Monet, Femme au jardin, 1867). By the dress of the girl, one can definitely determine the year the picture was written - it was then that such dresses came into fashion. And it was this work that adorned the cover of the catalog of the exhibition of Monet's works from around the world, which took place a few years ago in Paris at the Grand Palais. The collection also abounds with works by the post-impressionists Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and other French artists of the early 20th century: Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Marquet, Vallotton. How did this wealth end up in the museum's collection? All the paintings were previously in the collections of Russian merchants Morozov and Shchukin, who bought the works of French painters in Paris, thereby saving them from starvation. After the revolution, the paintings were nationalized by the Soviet state and placed in the Moscow Museum of New Western Art. In those years, Alfred Barr, the founder of the New York Museum of Modern Art, visited Moscow, for whom the Shchukin and Morozov collections served as a prototype for his future brainchild. After the war, the museum was disbanded due to its anti-national and formalistic content, and the collection was divided between the two largest museums in Russia - Pushkin in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Special thanks also deserve the then director of the Hermitage, Joseph Orbeli, who was not afraid to take responsibility and take away the most radical works of Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso. The second part of the Morozov-Shchukin collection can be admired today in the Gallery of European and American Art of the 19th-20th centuries. Moscow Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka.

Main Museum Complex, Winter Palace, III floor, rooms 316‒350

Just as all roads lead to Rome, so all the routes through the Hermitage go through the Pavilion Hall with the famous clock, familiar to everyone from the intro of the Kultura TV channel. The marvelous beauty of the peacock was made by the then fashionable English master James Cox, purchased by Prince Grigory Potemkin-Tavrichesky as a gift to Catherine the Great, delivered to St. Petersburg disassembled and already assembled on the spot by Ivan Kulibin. To understand where the clock is located, you need to get to the fence and look under the feet of the peacock - there is a small mushroom in the center, and it is in its cap that the clock is located. The mechanism is in working order, once a week (on Wednesdays) the watchmaker enters the glass cage, and the peacock turns and spreads its tail, the rooster crows, and the owl in the cage spins around its axis. The pavilion hall is located in the Small Hermitage and offers a view of Catherine's Hanging Garden - once there was a real garden with bushes, trees and even animals, partially covered with a glass roof. The Small Hermitage itself was built by order of Catherine II for dinners and evenings in an intimate circle of friends - “hermitages”, where even servants were not allowed. The design of the Pavilion Hall belongs to the later, post-Catherine period and is made in an eclectic style: marble, crystal, gold, and mosaics. In the hall you can find many more extremely interesting exhibits - these are elegant tables placed around the hall here and there, inlaid with enamel and semi-precious stones (mother-of-pearl, garnet, onyx, lapis lazuli), and Bakhchisarai fountains of tears, located symmetrically opposite each other on both walls. According to legend, the Crimean Khan Girey, bitterly mourning the death of his beloved concubine Dilyara, ordered the craftsmen to build fountains in memory of his grief - drop by drop, water falls from one shell to another like tears.

Main Museum Complex, Small Hermitage, II floor, room 204

The usual path from the Throne Room leads straight to the clock with a peacock, which is immediately left along the gallery with applied art of the Middle Ages. But if you turn right and take a little walk, you can see a very interesting collection of Netherlandish paintings of the 16th-17th centuries. For example, here is an altarpiece by Jean Bellgambe dedicated to the Annunciation. Once in the possession of the church, the triptych is valuable because it has survived in its entirety to this day. In the center of the triptych, next to the archangel Gabriel, who brought the good news to Mary, there is a donor (the customer of the painting), which for the Dutch painting of the 16th century. was a very bold move. The central part is built as if in perspective: the scene of the Annunciation occupies the foreground, and in the background the Virgin Mary is already busy with her everyday affairs - sewing diapers in anticipation of the birth of a baby. It is also worth paying attention to two group portraits of the corporation (guild) of the Amsterdam shooters by Dirk Jacobs, which in itself is a rarity for any museum collection of paintings located outside the Netherlands. Group portraits are a special pictorial genre, characteristic of this particular country. Such paintings were commissioned by associations (for example, shooters, doctors, trustees of charitable institutions), and, as a rule, remained in the country and were not taken out of its borders. Not so long ago, the Hermitage hosted an exhibition of group portraits brought from the Amsterdam Museum, including two paintings from the Hermitage collection.

Main Museum Complex, Small Hermitage, II floor, room 262

Currently, there are 14 surviving works by the famous Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci in the world. In the Hermitage there are two paintings of his indisputable authorship - Benois Madonna and Litta Madonna. And this is a huge treasure! An outstanding artist, humanist, inventor, architect, scientist, writer, in a word, a genius - Leonardo da Vinci is the cornerstone of all art of the European Renaissance. It was he who initiated the tradition of oil painting (before that, more and more tempera was used - a mixture of natural color pigments and egg yolk), he also gave rise to a triangular composition of the picture, in which the Madonna and Child and the saints and angels surrounding them were built. Also be sure to pay attention to the six doors of this hall, inlaid with gilded metal details and tortoiseshell.

Main Museum Complex, Big (Old) Hermitage, II floor, room 214

The main staircase of the New Hermitage rises from the historic entrance to the museum from Millionnaya Street, and its porch is decorated with ten atlantes made of gray Serdobol granite. Atlantes were made under the guidance of the Russian sculpture Terebenev, hence the second name of the stairs. Once upon a time, the route of the first visitors to the museum began from this porch (until the mid-twenties of the last century). According to tradition - for good luck and in order to return - you need to rub the heel of any of the Atlanteans.

Main Museum Complex, New Hermitage

You won’t be able to pass by this hall, “The Prodigal Son”, one of the last and most famous paintings by Rembrandt, is indicated on all plans and guidebooks, and in front of it, just like in front of the Parisian “La Gioconda”, whole crowds always gather. The picture glares, and it can only be seen well with a raised head, or a little from afar - from the platform of the Soviet stairs (named not in honor of the country of the Soviets, but in honor of the State Council, which gathered nearby, in the hall on the ground floor). The Hermitage has the second largest collection of Rembrandt paintings, rivaled only by the Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam. Here is the infamous Danae (be sure to compare it with Titian's Danae - two great masters interpret the same plot), - in the eighties, a museum visitor splashed sulfuric acid on the canvas and inflicted two knife blows. The painting was carefully restored in the Hermitage workshops over the course of 12 years. There is also a beautifully mystical “Flora”, which supposedly depicts the artist’s wife, Saskia, as the goddess of fertility, as well as a less popular, as if intimate picture, “David’s Farewell to Jonathan”. It depicts the farewell of the young commander David and his faithful friend Jonathan, the son of the envious King Saul. Men say goodbye at the Azel stone, which means "separation" in translation. The plot is taken from the Old Testament, and before Rembrandt there was no tradition of iconographic depiction of scenes from the Old Testament. The painting, filled with subtle light sadness, was painted after the death of Rembrandt's beloved wife and reflects his farewell to Saskia.

3. Collection of Dutch paintings in the Hermitage

dutch painting household genre

The State Hermitage has one of the world's largest collections of Dutch paintings. Its first exhibits appeared on the banks of the Neva in 1716, long before the museum was founded. This year, Osip Solovyov bought one hundred and twenty-one paintings for Peter I in Holland, and after that, Yuri Kologrivov bought another one hundred and seventeen paintings in Brussels and Antwerp. A little later this collection was joined by one hundred and nineteen works sent to the king by the English merchants Zvan and Elseiom. Dutch paintings, along with Flemish ones, prevailed here: according to the biographer of Peter I, Jacob Shtelin, the tsar's favorite artists were Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Steen, Wauwerman, Brueghel, van der Werf and van Ostade, and his favorite subjects were scenes from life " Dutch men and women. This commitment to all things Dutch should not be seen as merely the personal taste of "Skipper Peter", as Peter was called during his stay in Holland. Dutch burgher democratism, which found a vivid expression in national painting, was especially close to the nature of democratic transformations in Russia at that time in the field of culture and life. But, of course, not only artistic interest was awakened in the Russian audience by the paintings of the Dutch painters. The works of such masters as the tsar's favorite seascape painter Adam Silo satisfied, first of all, the cognitive interest of the young Russian nation going out to sea. The Peter's collection of the Dutch already included such masterpieces as Rembrandt's "David and Jonathan" - the first work of a brilliant painter that came to Russia.

In the second half of the 18th century, many significant works of Dutch painting migrated to St. Petersburg. As part of the collection of G. Bruhl, acquired in Dresden (in 1769), the Hermitage received four portraits by Rembrandt, four landscapes by J. Ruisdael, paintings by G. Terborch, F. Miris, A. van Ostade, A. Wauwermann and others. The Crozat collection in Paris, received in 1772, brought to the museum such Rembrandt masterpieces as Danae and The Holy Family.

The collections of Baudouin (Paris), Walpole (England) and the first wife of Napoleon I, Empress Josephine, acquired for the Hermitage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, further enriched the Hermitage collection of the Dutch. The Hermitage was then able to include in its exposition "The Sacrifice of Abraham", "Descent from the Cross" and a dozen other canvases by Rembrandt, the work of H. Dow, fashionable in the 18th century, three of the best paintings by P. Potter (among them the masterpiece of the master - "The Farm"), " A glass of lemonade” by G. Terborch, “Breakfast” by G. Metsu, two amazingly delicate executions of flower still lifes by J. van Huysum and many other no less significant works.

An entertaining plot, small size and relatively low prices made Dutch paintings accessible to a large circle of Russian collectors. They were acquired not only by members of the royal house and the highest St. Petersburg nobility, but also by representatives of more democratic circles of the population. These collections will subsequently become the main source of replenishment of the Hermitage collection. So, in 1915, the museum received a huge collection of “small Dutchmen” acquired in 1910 by the famous Russian scientist and traveler P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, who collected seven hundred and nineteen paintings by three hundred and forty authors. With this collection, one hundred and ninety new names appeared in the museum's catalogue. Thus, if earlier the Dutch collection of the Hermitage stood out among other museums in the world by the number of masterpieces, now it has taken one of the first places in terms of the number of names represented in it, including the rarest ones.

Gothic stained glass

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Impressionism in painting, music and literature

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The history of the development of still life

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Culture and Art of Ancient Babylon

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Limoges enamels of the 12th-14th centuries

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Still life "Shadows"

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Still life "Shadows"

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Still life as a genre of painting

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Landscape in visual arts

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Rococo in different art forms

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to study the stylization of decorative composition; identify the main stages of work; to develop recommendations for the use of decorative painting in the creation of panels. The novelty and practical significance of the work...

Creating a decorative panel for scenic performances

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Color in painting

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Sensual Connections in the Everyday Genre of Dutch Painting of the 17th Century

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