The Hermitage

The Biography of a Great Museum

Geraldine Norman

• Publisher: Unicorn
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912690091
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

The Hermitage Musuem in St Petersburg is possibly the greatest museum in the world. It began as a showcase for the art treasures of the Tsars and reflects their legendary extravagance. Imperial romances, marriages and murders all had an impact on the collection, as did the byzantine bartering of international politics. Nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the museum expanded to fill the imperial family's Winter Palace and the three riverside pavilions that were built onto the palace in the late eighteenth century. Vast, confiscated collections came the way of the museum as a result of the Revolution - the finest treasures of the Russian nobility, as well as two great merchant collections of Gauguin, Matisse and modern masters.

The courage and devotion to scholarship of its curators have helped the museum survive the terrible trials of the twentieth century: the exile, imprisonment and execution of many staff during Stalin's purges, and extremities of hunger during the siege of Leningrad - when 2, 000 people lived in a makeshift bomb shelter in the museum cellars. With the 1990s has come a new battle, as the Hermitage struggles to survive amidst the economic chaos of post- Communist Russia.

The Hermitage is the first full history of this great museum in any language. It highlights the human adventures involved in the creation and preservation of one of the finest art collections in the world, and reveals the hitherto unchronicled dramas of the Communist years. It provides an unusual perspective on Russia's troubled history.

CHAPTER 1

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CATHERINE’S HERMITAGE AND PETER’S CITY

Hermitage is pronounced with a French accent in Russia. It loses its ‘H’ and the stress falls on the last syllable. It should be spelt ‘Ermitazh’, if one follows the standard rules for converting Russian Cyrillic script into our own. It is one of the many French words that entered the Russian language during the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), the crude, seven-foot genius who built St Petersburg and forced his people to shift their mental orientation from East to West.

Both Peter and Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–96) prided themselves on introducing French culture and habits into their country. As a result, Russia’s premier museum takes its name from an aspect of country living which became popular in France in the seventeenth century and turned into a pan-European landscape gardening fashion in the eighteenth. A hermitage, with or without a hermit, sometimes in ruins and sometimes intact, was a required feature of a fashionably landscaped park of the Romantic era. When Peter began to build his great country palace of Peterhof, a seaside imitation of Versailles complete with fountains and garden pavilions, he naturally included a hermitage — the first Russian Hermitage. It was a two-storey building with an upstairs dining room lined, edge to edge, with Dutch seventeenth-century paintings and Peter used it for private parties.

So when Catherine built a pavilion on to her Winter Palace in St Petersburg, as a private place where she could entertain her friends without ceremony and hang her pictures, she called it her Hermitage. And the name stuck. Her original pavilion is now known as the Small Hermitage and a second extension she built to accommodate her overflowing art collection is known as the Old Hermitage. The theatre she later tacked on to them is known as the Hermitage Theatre. When a museum was built on to the palace complex in the nineteenth century, it was dubbed the New Hermitage. Since 1917 the collections have gradually spread to fill all the former palace buildings and the whole, magnificent complex is now known as the State Hermitage Museum.

As with their other borrowings from European culture, the Russian idea of a hermitage differed considerably from the models that inspired it. The first hermitages had been constructed in Italy during the Renaissance by princes with a genuine desire to mix piety with pleasure on their country estates. Buen Retiro in Madrid, built between 1636 and 1639, was the first royal palace to have custom-built hermitages, with chapels and fountains, in its park – the Spaniards saw no contradiction in serving God and Mammon simultaneously. From Spain the fashion spread to France but with a shift in emphasis. In the late seventeenth century Louis XIV built the Château de Marly as a place of retreat, where he could escape the rigid etiquette he had instituted at Versailles, and called it his Hermitage.

According to the Due de Saint Simon, whose memoirs paint a vivid picture of life at the French court, the king ‘sickened with beauty and tired at last with the swarm of courtiers, persuaded himself that from time to time he needed a small place and solitude … so the Hermitage was built. The plan was to spend there three nights only, from a weekday to a Saturday, two or three times a year, with a dozen or so courtiers for necessary attendance. But what actually happened was that the Hermitage was enlarged, building after building sprang up, hills were removed, waterworks and gardens were put in.’

This was where the Russian idea of a hermitage came from. Peter the Great visited Versailles and Marly in 1717, shortly after Louis XIV’s death, and was delighted with them. He saw a hermitage as a place where you could entertain your friends without fuss or ceremony. The Hermitage that he built at Peterhof was a small, moated, two-storey building with a system of pulleys which allowed the dining table on the first floor to be supplied from below, thus making the presence of servants unnecessary during his carousals.

When Peter’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, was laying out the park of her own great country palace, Tsarskoe Selo, in the 1740s, she naturally included a hermitage, this time a Baroque dining pavilion with another mechanical table. Elizabeth Dimsdale, the wife of a British doctor, has left an account of how it worked. There were ‘four dumb waiter plates with silver rims and something of the slate kind in the middle of them and a pencil fixed to each plate. You wrote on the plate what was ordered, then pulled another string and the plate sunk down and returned again with the order, dishes the same.’

This was the kind of hermitage that Catherine had in mind when she commissioned the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to add a small pavilion to the majestic Winter Palace she had inherited from the Empress Elizabeth. The buildings were connected by a covered bridge and both look out over the broad waters of the River Neva just before it splits in two to flow either side of Vasilevsky Island.

The Empress Elizabeth had referred to the rooms in her palace that she used for private entertainment as her ‘Hermitage’. Catherine was thus following her lead when she added a hermitage pavilion to the palace – but it was still connected in her mind with a garden. Her original idea was to have a first-floor ‘hanging garden’ built over her stables. At one end, which connected directly with her private apartments, there were to be rooms for her lover, Count Grigory Orlov. At the other, there would be the hermitage proper, a suite of rooms looking out over the river which she would use for entertaining her friends. There was also a conservatory which opened on to the hanging garden, which she kept bustling with songbirds. Before the building was completed, Catherine had begun collecting paintings on a massive scale, so she had picture galleries added down the sides of the garden.

The galleries quickly proved inadequate for her collection – she bought 2,000 pictures in the first ten years of her reign. So she had the German-trained architect, Yury Velten, build her a second, larger extension to the palace. As well as galleries, it contained a library, a medal cabinet and a billiard room – Catherine was very fond of billiards. It was tacked on beyond Vallin de la Mothe’s small pavilion and the two buildings came to be known as the ‘Small Hermitage’ and the ‘Old Hermitage’.

Like its namesakes in the parks of Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine’s Small Hermitage had tables volants – dinner tables which could be mechanically raised or lowered from the ground floor by a system of pulleys. ‘In the dining-rooms, there are two tables side by side laid for ten,’ the German writer Friedrich Melchior Grimm explained in a letter to society hostess Madame Geoffrin in 1774. ‘Waiting is done by machine. There is no need for footmen behind chairs, and the Provost of Police is distinctly at a disadvantage as he is unable to report to Her Majesty anything that is said at these dinners.’

Catherine regarded her Hermitage as a sort of private club, whose members she personally selected, and as a place where she could forget her rank and relax. She particularly enjoyed small dinners for a dozen or so people and would often carry off her guests to watch a play in her private theatre afterwards. She held soirees known as Petits Hermitages for sixty or eighty people several times a month and, more rarely, Grands Hermitages to which she invited up to 200 guests, providing them with dinner and a ball.

To ensure that everyone behaved properly in the intimacy of her Hermitage, she drew up a set of rules which she had mounted on the wall:

1 All ranks shall be left behind at the doors, as well as swords and hats.

2 Parochialism and ambitions shall also be left behind at the doors.

3 One shall be joyful but shall not try to damage, break or gnaw at anything.

3 One shall sit or stand as one pleases.

4 One shall speak with moderation and quietly so that others do not get a headache.

5 One shall not argue angrily or passionately.

6 One shall not sigh or yawn.

7 One shall not interfere with any entertainment suggested by others.

8 One shall eat with pleasure, but drink with moderation so that each can leave the room unassisted.

9 One shall not wash dirty linen in public and shall mind one’s own business until one leaves.

That Catherine needed to ban drunken brawls at her soirees underlines how superficial the French polish adopted by the Russian court remained at this period. It was only a matter of fifty years since Peter the Great had visited London, Paris and Vienna and brought home with him the vision of how a European court should look and behave – a vision that he proceeded to impose on Russia. He forced his nobles, the boyars to abandon the long fur robes they had worn for centuries and adopt European dress. He cut their flowing beards with his own hands, ignoring pleas for mercy; the Russians believed that their beards, so similar to those worn by the Apostles in icon paintings, were passports to heaven and several carried the severed relics in their pockets after Peter’s scissors had put their salvation at risk.

Above all, it was Peter who moved the Russian capital from Moscow to St Petersburg, in the far north, where he built a new, European-style city on the marshy delta of the River Neva. He wanted it to look like Amsterdam but since he and his successors used mainly Italian architects, it ended up looking more like Venice.

Peter was also an art collector and founded Russia’s first public museum, the so-called Kunstkammer, whose elegant Baroque building can still be admired from the windows of the Hermitage, a little downriver, on the banks of Vasilevsky Island. While the treasures of the Hermitage include imperial acquisitions dating back as far as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1547–84), its first great works of art were acquired by Peter. It is with him, rather than Catherine, that the history of the Hermitage museum really begins.

Peter’s posthumous fame rests almost equally on cruelty and culture. He tortured his eldest son Alexey to death in an effort to obtain evidence of a non-existent plot against him, and executed his subjects on a lavish scale, but he also succeeded in introducing the most up-to-date developments of European science, engineering and art to Russia. He was a passionate ‘improver’ of his people.

Peter became co-tsar at the age of ten in 1682, in partnership with his half-brother Ivan V who was to die in 1696. Ivan’s sister Sophia became Regent and Peter was banished from the court, growing up with little education. He loved to play games of war, constantly ordering arms for the use of his young playmates and, more significantly from the point of view of St Petersburg, which was to be Russia’s first significant sea port, he developed a passion for boats and boatbuilding.

At first Peter learned what he could about boats from knowledgeable locals and the inhabitants of the foreign quarter of Moscow – in old Muscovy foreigners lived apart from the rest of the population. Then he sent agents abroad to study the techniques of seafaring nations. Finally, he went abroad to learn for himself. In 1697–8, he embarked on his first foreign journey, known as the ‘Great Embassy’, travelling ‘incognito’ with a retinue of 250. No one was taken in by his disguise but it enabled him to avoid pomp and formality, which he disliked. He spent several weeks living with a Dutch blacksmith-turned-fisherman in Zaandam, working as a carpenter in the dockyard there.

Firm in the knowledge of his limitless power, Peter liked to play the humble citizen. In Zaandam he lived in two rooms with a stove and a mattress that could be packed away in a cupboard. The rooms have been preserved as a sort of Petrine shrine, which has been visited over the centuries by a succession of tsars. From Holland, Peter moved on to Britain to investigate the naval shipyards of Greenwich, where another of his characteristics became apparent. Here, he was lent the diarist John Evelyn’s house but devoted so much time to hard drinking with his companions that the house and garden were virtually destroyed – floors and furniture were used as firewood, trees were cut down and bushes were uprooted. After his departure, Sir Christopher Wren had to be sent down to Greenwich to rebuild the house.

On his return to Russia, Peter built two navies, one to attack the Turks in the south and the other to attack the Swedes in the north, but he built them on rivers since, at the time, Russia’s only access to the sea was its Arctic coast, where the water was frozen for most of the year. It was thus of enormous significance to Peter when, in 1703, he defeated the Swedish army and captured a stretch of coast on the Gulf of Finland. He immediately ordained the construction of a fortress on the mouth of the Neva to protect the territory from Swedish reprisals, and this became the very first building of St Petersburg, the so-called Peter and Paul fortress.

Peter’s absolute power as autocrat enabled him to draft 20,000 men to work on its construction. According to an account given by the Hanoverian ambassador, Friedrich Christian Weber, some of them came ‘Journies of 200 to 300 German miles’. There were neither sufficient provisions to furnish them with the necessary Tools, as Pickaxes, Spades, Shovels, Wheelbarrows, Planks and the like, they even had not so much as Houses or Huts; notwithstanding which the Work went on with such Expedition, that it was surprising to see the Fortress raised within less than five Months time.’

Peter’s contemporaries considered it crazy to build a city in the far north of the country in harsh climatic conditions. Its inhabitants had to contend with snow and ice for five months a year, then floods, and finally hot summers when the steaming marshes spread disease. Nevertheless, by 1704 Peter was referring to the new settlement as his ‘capital’. And his spectacular defeat of the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709 confirmed his determination to make it the first city of the empire.

He built himself a log and mud cabin on the north bank of the Neva where he lived while directing the construction of the city. His principal architect, Domenico Trezzini, came from Switzerland but had studied architecture in Rome; he arrived in Russia in 1705 and drew up overall plans for the city as well as designing its principal buildings. The government was moved from Moscow in 1712 and Peter populated his city by decree. In 1710 he demanded that 40,000 workmen a year should be sent from the provinces with their tools. All nobles owning more than thirty families of serfs were required to settle in St Petersburg and build houses there. Those who owned more than 500 serfs had to build stone houses of at least two storeys. In order to secure enough stonemasons, he issued an embargo on the construction of stone buildings elsewhere in the country.

Weber has left a classic account in his The Present State of Russia, published in 1723, of how the diplomatic corps was drafted into clearing woodland in 1715. It provides a glimpse of the Petrine life-style:

His Majesty, who was restrained in his own drinking, gave us a well matured Hungarian wine at dinner. We could hardly stand, having drunk such a quantity already, but it was impossible to refuse another pint glass offered by the Tsarina herself. This reduced us to such pitiful circumstances that our servants chose to throw one of us into the garden, and another in the wood where we stayed till four p.m. in the afternoon, and where we were sick. We were woken up at four p.m. and we went back into the Palace where the Tsar gave us each an axe and ordered us to follow him. He took us into a wood, planted with young trees.

Wanting to reach the sea, he had marked out a cutting and immediately started cutting wood down alongside us. Hardly able to cope with this type of work, especially after a debauch which had made us very tired, the seven of us, not counting His Majesty, finished off the alley in three hours. This violent exercise sweated us out of our alcoholic haze. No accident happened except that Mr—, one of His Majesty’s Ministers, lurching hither and thither, was knocked over by a tree which fell on him.

Having thanked us for our work, His Majesty paid for our supper that night. A second debauch followed; this time we fainted away and were put to bed. After one hour’s sleep, one of the Tsar’s favourites woke us up to visit the Prince of Circassia, in bed with his wife. We had to drink brandy and wine by his bed till four o’clock when we found ourselves at home, ignorant of how we got there. At eight a.m., we went to Court to drink coffee but the cups were full of brandy.’

Peter was dedicated to hard drinking and considered it necessary to offer visitors a choice of vodka, Hungarian wine or coffee when he opened Russia’s first museum, the so-called Kunstkammer. His henchman, Alexander Menshikov, the first governor of St Petersburg, objected but Peter insisted that making alcohol available was vital in order to attract attendance. Neither his theatres nor his museum were immediately popular with the boyars who had reluctantly settled in St Petersburg.

Many exhibits from Peter’s Kunstkammer have ended up in the Hermitage, but art was not its main focus. As the German term Kunstkammer implies, it was a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ of the kind accumulated by both scholars and monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a combination of found objects, such as shells and minerals, scientific specimens, curiously wrought craft works, jewels and paintings. Peter was inspired by the cabinets he saw in Holland and Germany on his Great Embassy in the 1690s; he spent three days in detailed study of the Elector of Saxony’s Kunstkammer in June 1698. His first purchases are recorded in the Embassy accounts: ‘Bought at Amsterdam from the merchant Bartholomew Vorhagen, a marine animal, a “Korkodil”, also a sea fish called Swertfish, for his Highness the Tsar’s personal household, and the animal and the fish have been handed to bombardier Ivan Hummer for taking to Moscow.’

Peter was less interested in painting bu...