Heritage · Museum
The State Hermitage Museum : Iconic Art, History & Exhibits
The State Hermitage Museum showcases a rich collection of artifacts, art, and cultural history. Explore exhibits, key highlights, and visitor information.Written to last — not to trend.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-07-20 · 7-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
The State Hermitage Museum occupies a row of imperial buildings along the Neva River embankment in St Petersburg, Russia, with the green-and-white Winter Palace at its centre. It began in 1764 as the private gallery of Empress Catherine the Great and grew into one of the oldest and largest art museums anywhere, holding more than three million objects that reach from Palaeolithic tools to twentieth-century painting. Reference works often rank it as the second-largest art museum in the world by gallery space, behind the Louvre in Paris.
The holdings are so large that only a fraction is ever on view at once. A figure repeated by guides suggests that a visitor pausing one minute at each exhibit, eight hours a day, would need years to see it all. That number is an illustration of scale rather than a schedule anyone follows, but it captures the problem the Hermitage poses: it is less a single museum than a city of collections gathered under connected roofs. The institution is also known for a quieter tradition, a colony of working cats that has patrolled its cellars against mice since the eighteenth century.
The Hermitage traces its founding to 1764, when Catherine the Great acquired a set of paintings that the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky had assembled for Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick, drained by the Seven Years' War, could not pay for the pictures, and the collection of mainly Flemish and Dutch masters went to the Russian court instead. Accounts of that first purchase differ, with the museum's own records citing between 225 and 317 paintings. Catherine kept them in a secluded wing beside the Winter Palace that she called her hermitage, a French word for a private retreat, and over time that name spread to the whole institution.
Catherine treated collecting as an instrument of statecraft, a way of signalling that Russia belonged among the cultured European powers. Through her agents and correspondents, including Denis Diderot, she bought entire cabinets from across the continent: the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl from Dresden in 1769, the Crozat collection from Paris in 1772, and in 1779 the paintings of the British prime minister Robert Walpole from Houghton Hall in Norfolk. She is said to have joked that only she and the mice admired her pictures, and the acquisitions kept coming until her death in 1796. Her successors continued the habit, adding classical antiquities, Egyptian material, and Russian decorative arts.
The palace that held all this nearly burned in December 1837, when a fire tore through the Winter Palace and gutted its state interiors over three days. Nicholas I ordered the building saved and rebuilt at speed, and thousands of workers restored the shell and its great halls within roughly fifteen months, following Rastrelli's plan in the ceremonial rooms while remodelling others in newer tastes. The episode showed how central the palace had become to the monarchy's image, and the rebuilt interiors are the ones visitors walk through today. Through the nineteenth century the collection also grew by excavation as much as by purchase, as Russian archaeologists opened Scythian burial mounds in the south and shipped their gold north to the Hermitage.
For most of its first century the collection stayed private, shown to invited courtiers rather than the public. That changed under Emperor Nicholas I, who commissioned a purpose-built gallery, the New Hermitage, and opened it to visitors on 5 February 1852. Admission was still restricted by dress and social standing, but the step made the Hermitage one of the first public art museums in Russia. After the 1917 revolution the imperial residence and its treasures were nationalised, and the Winter Palace itself became part of the museum. The early Soviet decades brought both growth and loss: nationalised private collections, including modern French painting, entered the museum, while the government sold off some masterpieces abroad in the late 1920s and early 1930s to raise hard currency, among them works that now hang in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The Hermitage counts more than three million items across departments that cover prehistoric cultures, classical antiquity, the art of the East, numismatics, Russian culture, and Western European art. Coins and medals alone account for roughly a third of the total, which is one reason the headline figure sits so far above what any visitor sees on the walls.
The Western European painting galleries are the reason many people travel to St Petersburg. The Hermitage holds two of the fewer than twenty accepted paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, the Benois Madonna and the Madonna Litta, both early Virgin-and-Child compositions. It owns Raphael's small Conestabile Madonna and a full-scale copy of the Vatican's Raphael Loggias, painted for Catherine and built into a riverside gallery. The museum keeps one of the world's largest groups of Rembrandt paintings, including the wounded and much-restored Danaë and the late Return of the Prodigal Son. Its single Michelangelo sculpture, the marble Crouching Boy, is the only work by the artist held in Russia. Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, Poussin, and Velázquez are all represented.
Beyond the painting galleries, the museum's older and eastern departments hold some of its rarest material. The classical antiquities include Greek and Roman marbles and a large body of Greek vases and jewellery, much of it excavated from the ancient colonies along the northern Black Sea coast. The department of the ancient world also keeps Egyptian sculpture and everyday objects, while the collections of the East cover Central Asia, China, India, and the Islamic world. The Siberian collection of Peter the Great, gold ornaments gathered from nomadic burial mounds, is often called the earliest systematic collection of Scythian gold, and it sits alongside later kurgan finds in the museum's treasure rooms. An arms and armour collection, imperial carriages, and one of the world's larger cabinets of coins and medals round out holdings that stretch well past the familiar names on the gallery walls.
A separate strength lies in modern French art. In 1948 the Soviet state transferred hundreds of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern works from the nationalised collections of the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, splitting them between the Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin Museum. The Hermitage share includes paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, alongside major canvases by Henri Matisse, among them versions of his Dance and Music, and a run of early Picasso. Elsewhere the museum shows Scythian and Siberian gold in its treasure rooms, ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities, and imperial regalia. One perennial favourite is the eighteenth-century Peacock Clock by the London jeweller James Cox, an automaton of gilded birds that curators still wind so visitors can watch it move.
The museum is not one building but a linked complex of six historic structures. The Winter Palace, the largest, was built between 1754 and 1762 by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth in an exuberant Baroque style, its celadon-and-white facade lined with columns and statuary. It served as the principal residence of the Russian monarchs until 1917 and contains many hundreds of rooms, including the Jordan Staircase and the throne rooms.
Beside it stands the Small Hermitage, built between 1764 and 1775 by Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe and Yury Felten, which holds the glass-roofed Pavilion Hall and a hanging garden. Next comes the Old Hermitage, also called the Great Hermitage, completed by Felten in 1787 to house Catherine's expanding library and galleries. The Hermitage Theatre, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi between 1783 and 1787, occupies the far end of the row and still hosts performances. The New Hermitage, designed by the German architect Leo von Klenze and opened in 1852, was the first section conceived from the start as a public gallery; its street portico is carried by ten grey granite figures of Atlantes.
The interiors are exhibits in their own right. The ceremonial Jordan Staircase rises in white marble and gilt to the palace's main floor, and the enfilade beyond it runs through halls such as the Field Marshals' Hall, the Armorial Hall, and the 1812 War Gallery lined with portraits of the generals who fought Napoleon. The green-columned Malachite Room, faced with panels of Ural malachite and rebuilt by Alexander Bryullov after the 1837 fire, served the last imperial family as a formal drawing room and, in 1917, as a meeting place for the Provisional Government in its final hours. These rooms let the museum tell two stories at once, one about the paintings on the walls and one about the people who once lived among them.
In recent decades the museum has spread beyond the palace row. It took over part of the General Staff Building across Palace Square, a sweeping neoclassical arc built by Carlo Rossi in the 1820s, and refitted its eastern wing to display the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections, including the Impressionist and modern galleries. Further holdings and conservation studios sit in the Menshikov Palace and in a large open-storage facility at Staraya Derevnya, where visitors can see reserves that would otherwise stay out of sight. Together the buildings form part of the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The Hermitage carries a weight beyond its art, because its central building is where modern Russian history repeatedly turned. The Winter Palace was the seat of the tsars, the site of Bloody Sunday's aftermath in 1905, and the target of the storming that the Bolsheviks staged and later mythologised as the founding act of the October Revolution in 1917. To walk its halls is to move through the stage set of an empire and its collapse, which is part of why the museum reads as a national institution rather than a gallery alone.
Its identity as a place of continuity has drawn artists in turn. The filmmaker Alexander Sokurov shot his 2002 feature Russian Ark entirely inside the Hermitage in a single unbroken take of about ninety minutes, using the building's rooms to sweep through three centuries of Russian history in one continuous movement. The film turned the museum's own architecture into a way of thinking about memory and the passage of time. The Hermitage also runs a broad programme of scholarship, conservation, and teaching, and has opened satellite exhibition spaces in other cities under its own name.
Then there are the cats. The tradition began in 1745, when Empress Elizabeth, troubled by mice in the Winter Palace cellars, ordered cats to be brought in and had skilled mousers sent from the city of Kazan. Catherine the Great kept the arrangement, and the animals have lived beneath the museum ever since, apart from a break during the wartime famine. Today several dozen cats, counted at various points between roughly fifty and seventy, live in the basements under a dedicated care programme with their own caretakers and clinic. They are barred from the galleries but appear on the embankment in summer, and the museum marks an annual Day of the Hermitage Cat.
The Hermitage's most testing chapter, and the clearest measure of what it exists to protect, came during the Second World War. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the staff began packing the collection almost at once, working around the clock to crate paintings, sculpture, and antiquities. In the first weeks of the war two special trains carried more than a million works east to Sverdlovsk, the city now again called Yekaterinburg, deep in the Urals and beyond the reach of the front. A third train was loaded and ready, but German forces closed the ring around Leningrad before it could leave, so the remaining crates were carried down into the museum's ground-floor halls and cellars.
What followed was the siege of Leningrad, which lasted close to nine hundred days and killed hundreds of thousands of the city's residents through starvation, cold, and bombardment. The Hermitage was not spared: shells and bombs struck the buildings, roofs failed, and water and heat gave out. The cellars became bomb shelters where museum staff and other citizens sheltered, and where some of them died. Curators kept the institution alive in symbolic ways, most famously by leading visitors on tours past the empty frames that still hung in place, describing from memory the pictures that had gone east. The frames had been left hanging deliberately, so that the paintings could be returned to their exact places after the war.
They were. The evacuated collection came back from the Urals in the autumn of 1945, with trains reaching Leningrad in October, and the museum reopened its main galleries to the public in November 1945, its holdings substantially intact. The cats did not fare as well; the siege famine wiped out the resident colony, and rats overran the cellars until new cats were brought in during the 1950s to take up the old duty. The wartime story is why the Hermitage is remembered not only as a collection but as something a city chose to save at great cost, and it remains central to how the museum presents itself. The account is preserved in the museum's own history galleries and in a UNESCO record of the institution under siege.
The Hermitage stands at 2 Palace Square, on the Neva embankment in the historic centre of St Petersburg. The nearest metro station is Admiralteyskaya, a short walk away, and the museum sits within easy reach of Palace Square, the Alexander Column, and the river. The main museum complex is traditionally closed on Mondays and open on the other days of the week, with separate hours for the General Staff Building and the Staraya Derevnya storage centre.
Because opening times, ticket prices, and entry rules change from season to season and have shifted with wider circumstances since 2022, the most reliable step is to check the official Hermitage website before planning a visit, and to buy timed tickets online where that option is offered rather than queueing on Palace Square. The scale of the collection rewards a plan: most visitors focus on one or two areas, such as the state rooms of the Winter Palace, the Old Masters galleries, or the Impressionist and modern floors in the General Staff Building, rather than attempting the whole museum in a day. The Staraya Derevnya facility, reached separately from the centre, offers guided access to open storage for those who want to see how a collection of this size is kept.
History and founding
The collection
The buildings
Cultural significance
What it preserves
Visiting
References and resources
- Hermitage Museum, Wikipedia. Overview of the history, buildings, departments, and holdings.
- The State Hermitage Museum, official site. Current hours, tickets, exhibitions, and the collection database.
- Britannica: Winter Palace. The Baroque residence by Rastrelli at the heart of the complex.
- Hermitage cats, Wikipedia. The eighteenth-century mouse-catching tradition and its modern care programme.
- UNESCO: Art under siege. The Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad.
- Russia Beyond: how the Soviets hid museum treasures in the Second World War. The 1941 evacuation to the Urals.
- Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg, UNESCO World Heritage List. The wider inscribed site that includes the museum.
- List of most-visited museums, Wikipedia. Attendance figures in international context.