A very significant event in the history of the Department of Western European Art took place in 1885. It was the establishment of its medieval and Renaissance sections. The collections which comprised these sections incorporated a sizable stock of objects deriving from a variety of sources. Thus, the splendid silver monstrance, a fifteenth-century work by Hans Rissenberger of Tallinn, especially interesting because it was signed, came from the St Petersburg Kunstkammer or Cabinet of Curios, where it had been kept since 1725. The collection of arms and armour, as well as a part of the above-mentioned Tatishchev collection that included some early stained glass panels, arrived from the Arsenal at Tsarskoye Selo, where it had been housed since 1811. But the nucleus of the new section was formed by the remarkable collection of sculpture and objects of applied art from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, built up by the Russian merchant Basilewsky in Paris in the 1760s and 70s and purchased for the Hermitage in 1884. A subtle connoisseur of art, whose enormous fortune enabled him to indulge freely in his passion for collecting, Basilewsky relied in his choice of art objects not only on his own erudition and taste but also on the opinion of the foremost experts of the age. His collection was distinguished for its exceptionally high artistic standard, and was justly regarded as an assemblage of masterpieces. It contained a great variety of bone carvings and metalwork — including the silver figure of St Etienne as a Deacon and the magnificent Freiburg Cross — painted and champlevé enamels, Hispano-Moresque and Italian majolicas (the famous Fortuni vase and the plate by Nicolò Pellipario), Venetian glass, French faiences, and many other things illustrative of practically every branch of applied art and artistic crafts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Basilewsky collection was equally rich in Italian, German, and Netherlandish sculpture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, among which the figure of the Mourner by Jean de Cambrai, the Netherlandish sculptor of the early fifteenth century, stands out by its wonderful expressiveness. And, finally, the Golitsyn Museum collection of twelfth- to sixteenth-century applied art entered the Hermitage, making its collection one of the best in the world.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Hermitage picture gallery was headed by two well-known Russian art historians, Ernest von Liphart and James Schmidt. They were able to make some quite valuable acquisitions and to enliven the work of the Museum so substantially that this could not fail to attract the public eye. Art collectors began to donate or bequeath their pictures to the Hermitage. That was how El Greco’s St Peter and St Paul came to the Museum from the Durnovo collection, and the famous eighteenth-century English portraits, among them Gainsborough’s Lady in Blue, from the Khitrovo collection. Of great value for the enlargement of the gallery’s Italian section was the acquisition, in 1911, of several pictures from Grigory Stroganov’s Roman collection, including the Madonna from the Annunciation by Simone Martini, an excellent specimen of Italian art in the first half of the fourteenth century, and several canvases from Paul Stroganov’s St Petersburg collection.
Liphart and Schmidt were also instrumental in obtaining for the Museum the collection of Semionov-Tien-Shansky, the celebrated Russian traveller and scholar. This collection, highly renowned among connoisseurs of art, brought in nearly seven hundred pictures by Flemish and Dutch masters, making the Hermitage one of the world’s most important and comprehensive repositories of Flemish and Dutch painting.
It is also Liphart to whom the Hermitage owes its second Da Vinci masterpiece, The Benois Madonna. This picture had been in the collection of Sapozhnikov, an Astrakhan businessman, since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was, however, only in 1908 that the work was identified as an early Leonardo. Liphart needed all his perseverance to refute doubts concerning the picture’s authenticity and to secure its purchase from the Benois collection in 1914.
The Great October Revolution opened up new vistas before the Hermitage. As a result of the policy laid down by the state for the preservation of the country’s art treasures, numerous works of art were handed over to the Museum following the nationalization of private collections.
Especially important additions came to the section of applied art from the former royal palaces in Tsarskoye Selo and from the Petrograd mansions of the nobility: the Sheremetevs, Yusupovs, Bobrinskys, Kochubeis, Dolgorukys, and Paskevich. This section also incorporated several large private and museum collections. Most valuable for the Hermitage were that of Botkin, the Russian artist and archaeologist (which included exceptionally fine specimens of medieval and Renaissance art) ; a selection of exhibits from the so-called Koniushenny Museum (Museum of the Imperial Stables), which housed coaches and carriages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some rare Gobelin tapestries; the collection of the Museum of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and the famous collection of the Stieglitz Museum. The latter collection contained remarkable samples of fifteenth- to nineteenth-century furniture, first-rate specimens of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish, German and French tapestry, and a variety of objects in glass, majolica, bone, ivory, and metal. These sources also enriched the Hermitage collection of Western European porcelain, which is represented today by articles from the world’s renowned factories of Meissen, Sèvres, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Vienna, as well as from private and provincial factories. The collections of textiles, embroideries, and other kinds of applied art were enlarged too.
Equally notable was the expansion of the section of drawings which in the nineteenth century had benefited only from the acquisition of minor collections and through donations. Now it came to incorporate the rich collections of graphic works once owned by the Yusupovs, Mordvinovs, and the Stieglitz Museum, as well as the choice collection of S. Yaremich and the finer part of drawings from the Museum of the Academy of Arts. Among the materials from the latter was the Betskoi collection which had been kept in the Academy since 1768 and had gradually fallen into oblivion to be rediscovered only after 1917. The high artistic standard of this collection can be judged by Group Portrait of the Family of the Dukes d’Este by Ercole dei Roberti and Virgin and Child by Albrecht Dürer.
Among the accretions made to the section of Western European sculpture after 1917, the most noteworthy were the above-mentioned Farsetti collection, transferred to the Hermitage from the Museum of the Academy of Arts; the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German and Netherlandish wooden sculptures, and French and Italian bronzes, which came from the museums of the Stieglitz School and the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts; works by Aristide Maillol, Franz Stuck, Max Klinger, and other masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as sculptures by Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and Auguste Rodin, all of which were received from the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. Today the Hermitage collection of sculpture numbers over two thousand items, covering the period from the Middle Ages down to the present day. The collection continues to expand. During recent years, for example, it has been enriched with three works by Matisse, The Large Tragic Mask of Beethoven by Bourdelle, and many other pieces.