The Hermitage - Western European Art [antikvár]

The early history of the Department of Western European Art may be said to resemble, in many respects, that of St Petersburg — Leningrad itself. Just as the new Russian capital, founded on the barren, swampy banks of the Neva, came to rival the luxury and splendour of Europe's ancient capitals in a mere two and a half decades, so the collection of works of Western European art, which was started in 1764 — the date traditionally regarded as the year of the Hermitage's foundation — needed only twenty-five years to attain that wealth and variety which placed it on a par with the most celebrated European collections. Isolated specimens of Western European art had of course found their way into Russia during the preceding periods, especially during the reign of Peter the Great, but consistent and purposeful collecting began only in the second half of the eighteenth century. The earliest acquisitions made by Catherine II were intended to decorate the sumptuous apartments of the huge new Winter Palace. Shortly afterwards, however, the palace collection outgrew its original decorative function and turned into a veritable art museum, the nucleus of the future Hermitage. The growth of this museum was indeed astonishingly rapid. Its very first printed catalogue, issued ten years after the collection was founded, listed 2,080 paintings, while only a decade later the Picture Gallery already contained 2,568 canvases. These works formed not a random assemblage of kunststiicke, but a carefully selected collection which included most of the masterpieces that were to bring the Hermitage its fame. Much of Catherine II's success in amassing the collection stems from the very circumstances surrounding the first acquisitions. In 1764, she received a consignment of 225 pictures from the Rerlin merchant Gotzkowsky, in payment of his debt to the Russian treasury. These works, almost exclusively by Dutch and Flemish masters, had been collected for King Friedrich II of Prussia, who, owing to financial difficulties caused by the Seven Years War, was forced to give up the idea of buying them. Having almost unlimited financial resources at her disposal, the Russian empress spared no expense to enlarge her museum. The rapid growth of the Hermitage in the first years of its existence was also partly due to the condition of the art market at the time. Large numbers of works of art were available for purchase, particularly in Paris, at auctions where treasures once owned by the now impoverished aristocracy were sold off. Agents of the Russian court would attend every sale which seemed to promise valuable acquisitions. It was Plate 30 at one such sale, for instance, that Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was bought for the Hermitage. Much more important for the Museum than the purchase of individual, though renowned canvases, was the acquisition of whole collections amassed by connoisseurs and lovers of art. The first of these was the collection of Heinrich Brühl, bought in 1769 from his heirs in Dresden. Count Brühl, the once omnipotent minister of Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had been entrusted with the task of acquiring art works for the Dresden Picture Gallery, and had accumulated an excellent collection of his own, containing paintings, drawings and engravings. This collection