Hermitage, in full the State Hermitage Museum, Russian Gosudarstvenny Ermitazh, art museum in St. Petersburg founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great as a court museum. It adjoined the Winter Palace and served as a private gallery for the art amassed by the empress. Under Nicholas I the Hermitage was reconstructed (1840–52), and it was opened to the public in 1852. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections became public property, and the museum was expanded in the 1920s with art requisitioned from private collections. In 1930–34, during the push for rapid industrialization, some of the masterpieces were sold by the Soviet government in order to underwrite purchases of industrial machinery from the West. The museum’s collection of late 19th- to early 20th-century European art was expanded substantially in the immediate post-World War II period. The museum is now housed within five interconnected buildings, including the Winter Palace (1754–62) and the Small, Old, and New Hermitages.

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg. © Marek Slusarczyk/Shutterstock.com

St. Petersburg: Hermitage Hermitage museum complex on the Neva River, St. Petersburg. Shown from left to right are: the Hermitage Theatre (green building), the Old Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the Winter Palace. © Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

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The Hermitage holdings include nearly three million items dating from the Stone Age to the present. Among them is one of the world’s richest collections of western European painting since the Middle Ages, including many masterpieces by Renaissance Italian and Baroque Dutch, Flemish, and French painters. Russian art is well represented. The Hermitage also has extensive holdings of Asian art; especially noteworthy is its collection of the art of Central Asia.

The largest of several satellite museums at home and abroad, the Hermitage Amsterdam, opened in the Netherlands in June 2009. Located on the Amstel River in the centre of Amsterdam, it is part of a larger effort to showcase the museum’s treasures in exhibits around the world.