The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg. One of the largest and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world. Beside the Louvre and the Prado, Hermitage Museum houses one of the most important collections of classical European art.
Originally, the only building housing the collection was the ‘Small Hermitage’. Today, the Hermitage Museum encompasses many buildings on the Palace Embankment and its neighbourhoods. Apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now also includes the ‘Old Hermitage’ (also called ‘Large Hermitage’), the ‘New Hermitage’, the Hermitage Theatre, and the Winter Palace, the former main residence of the Russian tsars. In recent years, the Hermitage has expanded to the General Staff Building on the Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace, and the Menshikov Palace. The Hermitage Museum is at the heart of the UNESCO world heritage Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg with 2,300 palaces, magnificent buildings and palaces. Together with the Bolschoi Theatre and the Russian State Library, UNESCO named the Hermitage Museum as the most important project in Russia.
The dependency of the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam is known as the Hermitage Amsterdam, and is located in the former Amstelhof building. It opened on 24 February 2004 in a small building on the Nieuwe Herengracht in Amsterdam, awaiting the closing of the retirement home which still occupied the Amstelhof building until 2007. Between 2007 and 2009, the Amstelhof was renovated and made suitable for the housing of the Amsterdam Hermitage. The Hermitage dependency in Kazan opened in 2005. The museum is situated in the Kazan Kremlin in an edifice previously occupied by the Junker School that was built in the beginning of the 19th century. In 2012, the State Hermitage Museum and the Government of Catalonia confirmed their intention of establishing in Barcelona a Hermitage-Barcelona museum center, due to open in 2015. A Hermitage branch is due to open in Vladivostok by 2016, and the regional government has allocated more than Rb17.7 million ($558,000) for preliminary reconstruction work on a mansion in Vladivostok’s historic downtown district to house the satellite.
