The presentation of the next stage of cooperation between the State Hermitage Museum and the JTI Company

On November 9th, 2011, a press conference was held to announce the next stage of cooperation between the State Hermitage Museum and the JTI Company.

Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, and Anatoly Vladimovich Vereschagin, the Director of Communications, Charitable and Sponsorship Projects of the JTI Company.

In 2014, the Hermitage, one of the world’s greatest museums, will turn 250.

With the support of its friends and partners, the museum will complete a series of projects to restore items in its collection and prepare new educational programs, museum exhibitions and temporary exhibits.

The most large-scale project, which will be presented to the public in 2014, is the creation of a museum of the art of the 19th-21st centuries in the restored East Wing of the General Staff Building.

One of the new exhibitions planned for the General Staff Building is a museum dedicated to the memory of Carl Faberge'. In the words of Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, “The goal of the creation of this new exhibition is to show Carl Faberge' as an important figure in the history of the art of jewellery in Europe. This will be an exhibition dedicated to the work of the legendary Russian jewellery and his contemporaries. At the same time, we will not limit these demonstrations to the art of the masters of the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, but will also familiarize our visitors with the achievements of cotemporary jewellers and stone cutters.”

This project, as well as many others dedicated to the 250-year anniversary of the Hermitage, is being prepared with the support of philanthropists, including the JTI company. With the support of this company, the Hermitage’s restorers have restored dishes made from rock crystal with enamel and diamonds, a silver lamp from 1894, and a necklace from the beginning of the 20th century, created by the masters of the Faberge' Firm.

“The period from the end of the 19th century to beginning of the 20th century was a golden age in Russian jewellery. It was precisely then that the Faberge' Firm reached its heyday, many masterpieces were created; the restoration and preservation of which impelled us to participate in this project,” said Martin Braddock, JTI Regional President of CIS, Bulgaria, Romania and Adriatics.

The Faberge' museum is not the first joint project of the State Hermitage Museum and JTI.

Cooperation on the restoration of items in the Hermitage collection began in 2003 with the restoration of a uniform belonging to Peter the Great for the “Founder of Petersburg. The 300-year anniversary of Saint Petersburg” exhibition. Later on, the restoration of armour and weapons for a permanent exhibition of Japanese Art in the Hermitage, and portraits of Russian field marshals, painted especially for the Field Marshalls’ Hall of the Winter Palace.

Last year, the museum and the company announced the conclusion of a three-year agreement on JTI’s support for the restoration of items for the jewellery exhibition dedicated to the 200-year anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812. As part of that agreement, tens of exhibition items: painting, the graphic arts, sculpture, weapons, will undergo restoration.

“It is possible to say that a strategic partnership between the State Hermitage Museum and the JTI Company has been established, for the preservation of the Hermitage collection items, which have important meaning for Russian art and culture,” noted M.B. Piotrovsky.

At the press-conference

Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum

Anatoly Vereschagin, Director of Communications, Charitable and Sponsorship Projects of the JTI Company

Dish made from crystal with enamel and diamonds
By Michael Perchin, the Faberge' Firm
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Silver lamp
By Michael Perchin, the Faberge' Firm
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Necklace made from miniature Easter Eggs
Faberge' Firm
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