The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

The Hermitage: Three Million Objects, Founded With 225 Paintings From a Berlin Merchant

Catherine the Great started it in 1764 with an acquisition of 225 paintings from a dealer in Berlin. By the time of the Revolution, the collection had grown through a century and a half of imperial purchasing into one of the world’s great museums. The Hermitage now holds approximately three million objects spread across six buildings along the Neva River embankment in central St. Petersburg, with around 80,000 on permanent display. The Winter Palace – wintertime residence of the Russian tsars from 1732 to 1917 – is the dominant building, an 18th-century Baroque palace by Bartolomeo Rastrelli designed to express the scale of imperial ambition in the most direct possible terms.

Access Note (as of 2026)

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, direct tourist access from Western countries has become significantly more complicated. Direct flights between most European and North American airports and Russia remain suspended; visa requirements have changed substantially; and many governments continue to advise against non-essential travel to Russia. Verify the current situation through your government’s travel advisory and check current visa and flight availability before planning a visit. The museum itself continues to operate for visitors who do reach St. Petersburg.

The Collection

The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings are extraordinary and often undervalued relative to Paris collections, largely because they are in St. Petersburg rather than in a city that received more Western visitor traffic. The museum owns 37 Monets, 31 Picassos, 23 van Goghs, and significant works by Matisse – including the Red Room and Dance, displayed in a room that lets you see both large canvases simultaneously. These works came primarily from the pre-Revolutionary collections of two Moscow merchant patrons: Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, who between them assembled what was the most prescient private Impressionist collection in Europe before 1917.

The Leonardo da Vinci works – the Benois Madonna and the Litta Madonna – are small and have been examined for centuries. They are in the Leonardo Hall; seek them specifically.

The Peacock Clock in the Pavilion Hall is a late 18th-century English automaton by James Cox with moving peacock, owl, and cockerel figures. It operates on Wednesdays at 3pm. One of the more unusual objects in any European museum.

The 26 Rembrandts in the Dutch and Flemish collection (halls 245-254) constitute one of the largest concentrations outside Amsterdam.

The Gold Room and Diamond Room require separate tickets and hold Scythian gold from the southern steppes – goldwork from the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE of a fineness that was not matched in European metalworking for well over a thousand years after it was made.

Navigating the Museum

The main visitor route through the Winter Palace covers about 3 kilometres end-to-end. Selecting priorities is necessary. Arrive before 11am to beat tour groups. The audio guide in multiple languages is very good and significantly enhances what the rooms contain. Photography without flash is permitted throughout.

Around the Museum

Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace is one of the architecturally most dramatic open spaces in Europe: the General Staff Building’s curved facade, the 47-metre Alexander Column, and the Winter Palace’s green and white Baroque facade all around a space larger than most city centres.

St Isaac’s Cathedral, 15 minutes south, has interior columns of malachite and lapis lazuli and a dome colonnade giving panoramic city views. The Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, built on the assassination site of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, has an interior covered entirely in mosaics.

Peterhof, 30 kilometres west and reachable by hydrofoil from the embankment near the Hermitage in 30 minutes, has more than 150 fountains running entirely on gravity – no pumps, just the elevation differential between the upper gardens and the sea below. Peter the Great ordered the fountains to run by gravity specifically to avoid the mechanical failures that plagued Versailles.