On 27 February 2007, the first special program for corporate friends of the Hermitage took place. Around 50 directors and representatives of St Petersburg companies that are cooperating with the Hermitage and are registered as corporate friends of the museum were invited for an evening reception which took place on the grounds of the Imperial Porcelain Factory.

The Hermitage Friends Club is a special program for development of the Museum and has provided substantial support to numerous projects involving restoration and reconstruction, to educational and research projects and to programs for purchase of new exhibit items. The Club brings together individual and corporate members. It includes both Russians and citizens of foreign states. The State Hermitage regularly organizes special events for members of the Club, including advance viewing of temporary exhibitions, meetings with curators, special visits to branches of the museum and evenings of music.

At the present time, around 70 companies are registered as corporate members of the Hermitage Friends Club. The first ones were Coca Cola and the Mezhdunarodny Moskovsky Bank. Ever since it entered the Russian market, and even before the official organization of the Friends Club, the Coca Cola Foundation (Atlanta) became one of the partners and friends of the Hermitage.

Companies which first came forward at the beginning of the 1990s remain corporate members of the Hermitage Friends Club to this day and each year help the museum to implement its projects.

In 2006 the Friends Club marked its 10th anniversary. During the anniversary season, the State Hermitage started to hold special programs for corporate members of the Friends Club. The first evening event was organized together with the Imperial Porcelain Factory, one of the Club's corporate members.

The Imperial Porcelain Factory is the only enterprise in Russia in its industrial sector which supplies premium class products and which has its own style and is capable of competing with works from the oldest factories in Europe. For more than 260 years the history of the IPF has been inseparably bound to the history of Russia, and its products - artistic porcelain - are held in the collections of major museums.

On this day a special program awaited the Hermitage Friends. The evening was opened by the Deputy Director of the State Hermitage for Exhibitions and Development, Vladimir Matveev. The guests were given the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the rich collection of porcelain in the Museum of Porcelain, which is now a department of the State Hermitage, and also to learn about the work of the enterprise's artistic laboratory. Factory specialists spoke about the history of porcelain, about the production technology and the peculiarities of hand painted porcelain items.

A surprise awaited all the participants at the end of the evening. Under the direction of master artisans of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, Hermitage Friends were given the chance to feel themselves artists if only briefly and to create their own compositions on snow-white porcelain surfaces. Statuettes, plates and cups which have the traditional and well known shape of the Factory literally came to life in the hands of the Friends, who painted them with great concentration. Unfortunately, they had to part with these unique, one of a kind works, though not for long. After the final firing, at the end of March, the works created on this evening will again return to their authors and will become splendid souvenirs of this first meeting organized by the Hermitage especially for the corporate members of the museum's Friends Club.

Greetings delivered by Deputy Director of the State Hermitage for Exhibitions and Development Vladimir Matveev

In the Museum of Porcelain, a department of the State Hermitage

Hermitage Friends painting porcelain

Painting porcelain

Painting porcelain