The Hermitage and the Winter Palace

The palace, and the monarch who never saw it

The present building is the fourth Winter Palace on or near the site. It was designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the Elizabethan Baroque, and built between 1754 and 1762 for Empress Elizabeth, who approved the drawings in June 1754 and died in December 1761, before it was handed over.

Older accounts say the palace was home to Russia's monarchs for a hundred and fifty years, starting with Catherine the Great. Both halves need correcting. The first occupant of the finished palace was Peter III; Catherine came to the throne only in June 1762. And although the site was the official imperial residence from 1732 to 1917, the last tsar genuinely resident here was Alexander II, who died in 1881. Alexander III moved the court to Gatchina, and Nicholas II left permanently in 1904. For the last third of its imperial life the palace was a ceremonial address rather than a home.

The fire

Fire broke out on 17 December 1837 — soot igniting in an unswept flue near the Field Marshals' Hall — and burned for three days. What it destroyed was the interiors; the masonry shell survived, and so, crucially, did almost everything movable. Nicholas I ordered the roofs of the galleries linking the palace to the Hermitage buildings pulled down to stop the fire reaching the collections, which worked.

Reconstruction was led by Vasily Stasov on the façades and state halls and Alexander Briullov on the private apartments, beginning in 1838 and substantially finished within about fifteen months, with work continuing into the early 1840s. The consequence matters for anyone looking at the rooms: the exterior is Baroque, but the interiors are overwhelmingly nineteenth-century neoclassical and eclectic rather than Rococo, because most of them were made after the fire rather than before it. The Jordan Staircase — named for the Epiphany ceremony in which the tsar descended it to bless the waters of the Neva — is one of the few eighteenth-century interiors still readable as such.

The buildings, properly named

Older accounts describe the museum as the Winter Palace plus four additions. The Main Museum Complex is in fact five linked buildings: the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old (Great) Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. Beyond them the museum runs the General Staff Building across Palace Square, the Menshikov Palace, the Winter Palace of Peter I, the museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, and the Staraya Derevnya restoration and storage centre.

Staraya Derevnya deserves a sentence of its own, because it is unusual among great museums and almost nothing written before 2003 mentions it. It is an open store: a working storage and conservation centre, built in two phases from 2003 and 2015, which the public can go round rather than a closed depot. The museum's argument is that a collection too large to display should at least be visible.

On the figures older accounts give — a thousand rooms, six buildings, a hundred and seventeen grand staircases — the staircase count belongs to the Winter Palace alone, and counts all its staircases rather than the grand ones. Room counts in circulation range from several hundred to fifteen hundred and cannot be reconciled; the honest statement is that several hundred rooms are open and that no published figure is reliable.

What the collection actually is

The museum dates from 1764, when Catherine II bought the collection assembled by the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky — who had put it together for Frederick the Great, and was left holding it when Frederick could not pay for it after the Seven Years' War. Accounts give the number of paintings as two hundred and twenty-five or three hundred and seventeen; the figure of two hundred and fifty-five that older accounts repeat belongs to neither tradition. The name Gotzkowsky and the Prussian connection are the point of the story, and are usually left out.

The collection now runs to more than three million objects, not the 2.7 million older accounts give — but the number flatters, because roughly a third of it is coins and medals, something like 1.15 million of them. The museum did not open to the public until 1852, under Nicholas I, with the New Hermitage: nearly ninety years after the founding purchase.

Two Leonardos, two Raphaels and one Michelangelo

This is where older accounts are not merely loose but wrong, and the correction improves the museum rather than diminishing it.

• Leonardo: two paintings. The Benois Madonna, bought by the Imperial Hermitage in 1914, and the Madonna Litta — which has never been unanimously accepted as Leonardo's, with some scholars giving it to Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.
• Michelangelo: one work, and it is a sculpture. The marble Crouching Boy of about 1530, fifty-four centimetres high, originally intended for the Medici tomb. There are no Michelangelo paintings here at all.
• Raphael: two panels — the Conestabile Madonna and the Madonna with Beardless Saint Joseph. The Raphael Loggias along the Winter Canal are not by him either: they are a full-scale copy of the Vatican loggia, built by Giacomo Quarenghi between 1787 and 1792.

So the phrase "numerous works by da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael" describes a museum that does not exist. The Italian Renaissance holdings are thin at the very top and extraordinary in depth below it, and the real strengths lie elsewhere — in Rembrandt and the Dutch seventeenth century, in antiquities, and in the modern French painting dealt with below.

One Rembrandt has its own history. Danaë was attacked on 15 June 1985 by a visitor who threw sulphuric acid over the canvas and then slashed it twice; the worst damage was to the face, hair and limbs. Restoration began the same day in the museum's own laboratory and was completed in 1997, twelve years later. The painting is back on display, and the episode is a better argument for the museum's conservation department than any statistic.

The modern French paintings, and how they were acquired

Older accounts call Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse "later Impressionists" and leave the impression that the modern holdings accumulated gradually. They did not. They come overwhelmingly from the collections of two Moscow merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, which were nationalised after the revolution and merged into the State Museum of New Western Art. That museum was closed on Stalin's order in 1948 and its contents divided between Moscow and Leningrad; 316 works came here.

What arrived included Matisse's The Dance and Music, both painted for Shchukin's staircase in Moscow, and Picasso's Absinthe Drinker, Dryad and Two Sisters. They hang today in the restored General Staff Building — Carlo Rossi's, of the 1820s — which the museum opened as its modern wing for its 250th anniversary in December 2014. Camille Pissarro, whose name older accounts mangle, is there too, with the Boulevard Montmartre.

The collection in the siege

Two freight trains of art left Leningrad in June and July 1941. A third was still being loaded when the Germans cut the last railway line out of the city, so a great deal stayed behind. The building took thirty artillery shells and two bombs; burst pipes froze and damaged furniture. The evacuated collections came back in October 1945.

The much-told story of empty frames left hanging in the galleries for the duration, and the precise tally of objects sent east, are not well enough documented to repeat as fact.

The cats

Cats have been resident since the eighteenth century. Elizabeth ordered them brought in in 1745 to deal with mice, reportedly including several good mousers sent from Kazan. The wartime population did not survive the siege and was replaced afterwards. They live mainly in the cellars and appear on the embankment in summer; there has been an adoption programme since 2007, and a Day of the Hermitage Cat each spring since the late 1990s, when the cellars and attics are opened to visitors. Numbers circulate freely — sixty, seventy-four, an "official fifty" that is a staff joke rather than a rule — and none of them is current.

The other thing not to walk past is the Peacock Clock in the Pavilion Hall of the Small Hermitage: an eighteenth-century gilded automaton by the London maker James Cox, which still works and is still wound.

Since 2022

The museum's international position changed sharply and the change has held.

• Loans were recalled in March 2022 on the culture ministry's instruction, the director writing that all outstanding loans must be returned. Works came back from Italy and from the Morozov exhibition in Paris, the latter by road in five convoys because flights had stopped.
• Three shipments were impounded in transit at the Finnish border in early April 2022, insured at some forty-two million euros, on suspicion of breaching sanctions. They were released back to Russia within days.
• Three works from the Paris show were retained in France: one belonging to a Ukrainian museum, and two whose owners were sanctioned.
• The museum announced a moratorium on exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and its director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, described exhibitions abroad in a June 2022 interview as "a kind of 'special operation'". He was sanctioned by Canada the following year. The museum's head of contemporary art resigned in October 2022.
• Hermitage Amsterdam severed its ties on 3 March 2022 and was renamed the H'ART Museum in September 2023, taking other partners.
• Outward loans now go to friendly states — in 2025 the only foreign venue in the programme was the National Museum of Oman.

Two things commonly attached to this story do not belong to it. The freeze on Russian–American museum loans dates from 2011, not 2022, and arose from a court judgment in Washington that made Russia unwilling to lend for fear of seizure. And the Scythian gold case — decided by the Dutch Supreme Court in 2023 in Ukraine's favour, the objects returned that November — was between the Ukrainian state and four Crimean museums. The Hermitage was not a party to it.

Visitor numbers tell the rest. Thirty-eight per cent of visitors were foreign in 2019; a museum official put the figure at one per cent in early 2023. Attendance overall has recovered to something near its former level, almost entirely from within Russia.

One thing that runs the other way

Several Russian state museums charge foreign visitors more than citizens and residents, and the suburban imperial palaces outside the city charge roughly double. The Hermitage used to do the same — until 2020 it had one rate for citizens of Russia and Belarus and a higher one for everyone else — but it dropped the distinction and has not restored it. In a 2023 interview Piotrovsky called charging foreigners more a "colonial mentality", and said the hard part had been abolishing it, because Russian citizens had come to regard the lower rate as a privilege. Whatever else has changed here, the ticket desk does not ask where a visitor is from.

The museum's own catalogue and collection are published at hermitagemuseum.org.