The State Hermitage Museum: Hermitage News

The Day of the March Cat at the Hermitage

The Day of the March Cat has been celebrated at the Hermitage since 1998. This year the festival has changed its status to become a regular event on the exhibition calendar. This is a big occasion for the museum and its cats.

Students from a lot of schools participated in the painting and drawing contest which this year was called The Hermitage Fairy Tale about Cats. The jury selected 11 works from many. The winners, aged 8-16, used different techniques in their works - from traditional watercolour to linocut, a technique untypical of young artists. The winning works are being exhibited at the Jordan Gallery from 26 March to 3 April. Besides, the Hermitage designers have made plates for the works of the winners that look the same as the plates on all the museum’s exhibits. The plates with the names of the authors and names of their works will be given to the winners. The award ceremony was held on 26 March.

After that Dmitry Shagin and the youngest visitors painted wooden cats in the yard of the Winter Palace for an hour; these cats will be decorating the yard for quite a while.

At the same time anyone interested could take part in a game when they had to find a museum exhibit basing on its detail. At the end of the tour the visitors found themselves up in the attic where they could see a photo exhibition The Magic Scarf of the Hermits by Yu. Molodkovets and A. Alekseev as well as an exhibition of forty two works painted specially for the occasion by contemporary Saint Petersburg artists.

After that visitors could go down to the basement to see the place where the majority of the Hermitage cats live. The most friendly cats agreed to pose for photos with the visitors.

The Day of the March Cat in the Hermitage is becoming a city tradition which makes us really happy. The more people will get to know the Hermitage’s living legend - the cats - the better the world will be. To make the Day of the March Cat in the Hermitage even better, the visitors were asked to write their suggestions in a special journal.