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Hermitage - Our Landscape: 400 Years of European
Paintings of the State Hermitage Museum State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is one of the greatest repositories of Western art in the world, in quality and quantity. Its collection is said to total 3 million works, 17,000 of which are paintings. And it is from these paintings that the exhibition has been assembled. The 80 paintings in the exhibition span European art from Renaissance Venice to Picasso and have been selected as a broad exploration of the eternal theme of "harmony of nature and humankind." The "Our Landscape" in the exhibition's subtitle refers to the European world in all its aspects from family life and life in the natural environment to the manmade urban environment. The paintings are grouped thematically in this way into three sections treating the family, nature and cities. The majority of the works come from the early to mid-nineteenth century, the era before photography stripped painting of one of its primary aims - realistic and detailed representation. Photolike realism and attention to detail reaches exceptional heights during this period, as shown by works such as View of Champs-Elysees from the Place de l'Etoile in Paris (1878) by Edmond-Georges Grandjean, where even the wheels of the carriages are painted with such skill that they appear to be spinning. Another impressive work that depicts a quite different scene with equally skilled capturing of moment is the night scene Fireworks in Naples (1875) by Oswald Achenbach. These are artists whose names may not be familiar to most museumgoers, but the very fact that their works found their way into the Hermitage means that they were highly acclaimed artists of the day who came to the attention of the czars. In other cases, a particular painting would become tremendously popular throughout Europe due to traveling exhibitions and end up being purchased by the Russian imperial family or one of the numerous Russian collectors who made their fortunes acquiring masterworks in Paris and other European capitals. Such was the case with the magnificent Court Ladies Bathing in the Eighteenth Century (1888) by the French painter Francois Flameng, which shows ladies bathing in the pool of the royal park in Versailles amid lush natural surroundings. Another slightly later historical work that provokes wonder is Napoleon I Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1807 (ca 1898), also by Flameng. The Hermitage collection traces its roots back to Peter the Great, the czar who realized his dream of regaining a point of access to the Baltic Sea and building a powerful navy that would win Russia the status of a full member in the European community of nations. In 1997-98, Peter made his first trip to Europe. In the Netherlands, where he studied shipbuilding, the czar became acquainted with a ship designer named Adam Silo who also painted seascapes. Peter ended up purchasing a number of Silo's paintings and other works of primarily Dutch painting to eventually build a collection of over 200 paintings. It was Catherine the Great, who began collecting art works in earnest, and again the motivation was to assert the Russian monarchy's status as powerful European rulers. In 1764, Catherine purchased several entire collections of famed European art and displayed them in a number of palace rooms that she came to call her hermitage. After that she continued to collect all manner of artworks and jewels that became the foundation of the Hermitage collection today. After Catherine's death, the czars continued to collect the best in European art, as did a number of wealthy Russian private collectors whose collecting at the time of the Impressionist and Postimpressionist movements brought many of the finest Monet, Renoir, Gauguin and Van Gogh paintings to Russia even before many Europeans were becoming aware of their value. After the Russian Revolution, most of these works found their way either into the Hermitage collection or the collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Some of the finest paintings in this exhibition are from this period, including Gauguin's masterpiece Woman Holding Fruit (1893) and a pre-Fauve painting by Matisse titled Luxembourg Garden (1901). There is also a token Picasso, a Rousseau, a Utrillo and two Bonnards. However, these are not the essence of this exhibition. The essence is the intimate and highly detailed views of European life depicted in works of the 18th and 19th centuries up until Impressionism. |
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Copyright © 2006 State
Hermitage Museum |
