The First Guidebooks to the Museum

The first visitors to the Imperial Museum passed inside beneath the portico with atlantes. They had to obtain a ticket in the Court Office, leave their outer clothing, galoshes, walking-sticks and umbrellas in the vestibule and enter their names in a special visitors' book. The 19th-century watercolour views of the interiors include elegant ladies, military men in uniform and civilians in formal attire. According to the "Rules for the Administration of the Imperial Hermitage", the museum was open to visitors from 8 in the morning till 6 in the evening in summer, and from 10 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon in winter, except when the Emperor or Empress were visiting themselves. In the mid-1860s the museum's first director, Stepan Gedeonov managed to obtain free access to the museum and the abolition of the dress code that required uniforms or tail-coats. Visitors were accompanied by attendants while looking round the museum. The assistants to the curators of the museum's two departments were expected not only to study the collections and compile "detailed and exact descriptions of them", but also to guide visitors ''satisfying their curiosity as far as possible".

The first guidebook to the rooms of the New Hermitage was created by Ludolf Eduard Stephani, the curator of Greek and Roman coins in the Hermitage, and it was published in 1856 in the fifth volume of the anthology Propilei. Soon the Guide to the Ancient Department of the Hermitage was published as a separate volume. It contained eight sections, as many as there were rooms of ancient art. The author describes the works with references to literature in which they (or similar items) were published and gives information about their provenance and restoration carried out on them. The descriptions of the Room of Vases and Room of Carved Stones are preceded by brief accounts of the history of ceramics and glyptics in the Ancient World.

In 1861, the head of the First Department of the Imperial Hermitage, the court librarian Florian Gilles, published a book entitled The Imperial Hermitage Museum. A description of various collections with a historical introduction about the Hermitage of Empress Catherine II and the formation of the New Hermitage museum. In the words of the author, this work is "a three-verst [two-mile] stroll in the course of which the lover of the arts and science can view treasures of the thinking of ancient and modern times." Effectively the book dealt with the displays of the First Department: Gilles gave a detailed account of the display of drawings and manuscripts, the library, the Prints Cabinet, the Cabinet of Small Bronzes, the exhibition of antiquities from Cimmerian Bosporus, and the collection of painted vessels and sculpture. The First Department also included the Münzkabinett, the collection of coins and medals, a guide to the Russian section of which had been created in 1852-53 by the civil servant V.F. Numers but not published.

The curators of the Picture Gallery were busy preparing a catalogue that came out in 1863. Early still, thanks to a private initiative, the first guide to the Picture Gallery appeared. This small volume entitled The Paintings of the Imperial Hermitage was published in 1859 by Andrei Somov, the future curator of the Hermitage, then still a very young man. In it he gave a lively and absorbing review of the most important sections of the museum. "It was my intention not only to give a certain amount of information about the paintings that comprise the Hermitage collection, but also to briefly acquaint its visitors with the history of painting and the character of the foremost tendencies in that art," Somov wrote. "To that end I arranged the paintings by school and in chronological order, prefacing an enumeration of the works of each artist with brief details about him." In 1865, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich produced a guide entitled A Stroll through the Hermitage. "The aim is to present the reader in general terms with a full picture of the Hermitage and to indicate in passing its main distinguishing features as a museum," the author wrote, emphasizing that these were "personal impressions. Our role here does not go beyond the modest one of an amateur, who decided to be a guide, because he has known the Hermitage for 20 years..."

The acquisition in 1861 of a considerable part of the Roman collection of Marchese di Campana turned the Hermitage's collection of antiquities into one of the finest outside Italy. The introduction of such a large number of new items led to changes in the Hermitage's displays: the "Museum of the Book" was abolished and the whole of the ground floor, with the exception of a single hall and gallery, was given over to antiquities. The seven rooms of Greek and Roman sculpture became known as the Museum of Ancient Sculpture. Gedeonov, who had been head of the Rome-based Commission for Archaeological Researches that had been responsible for the purchase of the Campana collection, and in 1863 became director of the Hermitage, wrote a guidebook to these rooms. In 1896, Gangolf Kizeritsky, the head of the First Department of the Hermitage, published a guidebook created on the basis of Gedeonov's work.

"Hand catalogues" - as the lists of paintings in each room were called - were printed for Hermitage visitors. Pasted onto thick cardboard and fitted with a wooden handle, these catalogues were made available to visitors. In 1872 the last engraved reproductions of Hermitage paintings appeared - two volumes of etchings by Nikolai Mosolov, published in Leipzig. Subsequently the leading role in this area was taken by photography. The first publication of photographs of Hermitage paintings was produced by the Roetger publishing house in St Petersburg in 1865, while in 1882 the German firm Braun published 288 photographic reproductions with accompanying text by Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Berlin Museums and one of the 19th-century's leading art-historians. The practice of publishing reproductions in separate volumes, established at the time when only engravings were available, persisted until the turn of the 20th century. In 1897 an album of photographs of Hermitage paintings produced by the Berlin Photographic Society was published. In the early 1900s colour reproductions of the best paintings appeared. In 1898, Somov's assistant, A.A. Neustroyev published a Guide to the Hermitage Picture Gallery, taking the form of an overview of the history of painting on the basis of the Hermitage collections. Two large volumes produced by private companies also appeared in which the museum's best paintings were reproduced. Somov wrote the text for one of them, P.V. Delarov for the other.

A remarkable Guide to the Hermitage Picture Gallery was created in 1910 by the talented artist and expert on the history of Western European art Alexander Benois. "The value of this book lies in the mass of shrewd judgements about individual Hermitage paintings scattered through it. This aspect of the book invests it with an especial freshness and preserves its absolute significance even today... the masterly combination of general characterization of tendencies and artists with the specific material of the Hermitage gallery prompts acknowledgement of it as an unsurpassed example of this kind of publication," was the verdict given in the second half of the 20th century by Vladimir Loewinson-Lessing, himself an outstanding scholar and author of The History of the Hermitage Picture Gallery (1764-1917). The year 1914 saw the publication of one more popular book, Among the Paintings of the Hermitage by V.G. Konradi.

In summing up, it should be pointed out that the Ministry of the Court that had responsibility for the Hermitage considered it necessary to publish as a priority catalogues of the collections, and not guides to the museum. Only after the October Revolution in 1917 did the situation change and a large number of Hermitage guidebooks appear. But that is another era in the history of the celebrated museum and of our country.

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