Approaching the State Hermitage Museum across Palace Square, a visitor first encounters a façade rather than a gallery: the long green-and-white Winter Palace, with its gilded details, once served as the principal residence of Russia’s rulers. Today it anchors one of the world’s great museum complexes on the Neva River. The scale can be overwhelming, but the Hermitage is easier to understand when seen as several connected histories: an imperial art collection, a palace landscape and a public institution that now occupies buildings created for different purposes.
The museum dates its foundation to 1764, when Empress Catherine II acquired a collection of paintings from Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The works were first held in rooms beside the palace, in a private retreat called the Hermitage, a name associated with seclusion. Catherine expanded the collection through purchases and gifts, and later rulers added to it. The New Hermitage opened as a public museum in 1852, changing access to a collection that had previously been reserved largely for the court and its guests.
