Painting, Passion and Politics: Masterpieces from the Walpole Collection

On 28 September, 2002, the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, London, inaugurated an exhibition from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister, now owned by the Hermitage. The exhibition shows 34 masterpieces of Old Masters most of which including canvases of Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin and Van Dyck will be on show in England for the first time since they were acquired by Empress Catherine the Great over 200 years ago. During the 1770s, Empress Catherine II purchased some of the most important European collections with a view to consolidate the international prestige of her empire. She attached special importance to the purchase of the Walpole collection, one of the most famous in the 18th century England.
Alongside canvases of renowned European masters, the Walpole collection included paintings of English and foreign artists of the 17th - early 18th centuries which showed the origins and process of the formation of the English national school of painting. Canvases of the outstanding Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck who is justly believed to have originated the English official portrait come from this collection.
The catalogue A Capital Collection Houghton Hall and the Hermitage is a modern edition of Aedes Walpoloanae, Horace Walpole's catalogue of Sir Robert Walpole's collection. The catalogue which for the first time presents the entire collection of Robert Walpole both in Russia and at Houghton Hall is a collaborative effort between British and Hermitage scholars. It is published by the State Hermitage Museum and the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and edited by Larissa Dukelskaya, Custodian of English Engravings, the State Hermitage Museum, and Andrew Moore, Custodian of the Art Collection, Norwich Castle Museum, Norwich, England.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Open Russia Foundation which aims to foster enhanced openness, understanding and closer relations between Russia and the global community. The Foundation was inaugurated by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Chairman and CEO of YUKOS, one of Russia's leading oil companies.

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