Saturday 16 April 2016

The Hermitage, St Petersburg


 The Hermitage in St Petersburg is somewhere I'd love to see – but I don't see myself comfortable visiting Russia any time soon.  Have any of you been there?  Was it great?

The Hermitage is now one of the world's greatest art museums.  It has over 150,000 works on display.  That would be so overwhelming!  But apparently that number is only 5 percent of their total collection!


Historically one of the 6 buildings making up the Hermitage was the Winter Palace of the tsars since Catherine the Great.  She was a dedicated art collector herself.  Apparently many of the rooms in the Palace are so finely decorated that they upstage the art – that would be worth seeing alone. 


The Hermitage is also home to a colony of cats – which is itself a tourist attraction.


This is part of the Malachite Room – just wow – made from this stone which was mined from the Ural Mountains.

Here are some of the works held there that it would be magic to see in the flesh:



Madonna Litta by Leonardo da Vinci


Woman in Blue by Thomas Gainsborough


Woman in a Garden by Claude Monet

1 comment:

  1. Looks like a beautiful place to visit. I find it interesting that it the cats are an attraction... Must be a lot of them!

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