Today we visited the famous, State Hermitage Museum with its fine architecture, gilded halls, and decorative wooden floors. It’s attached to, and includes, the Winter Palace, home of the Tsars. The Hermitage was developed around 1764/1773 as the result of Catherine the Great’s love of art. She collected some of the world’s finest. Today, the museum owns around 3 million pieces of art, some of which are displayed over three floors in the Winter Place, The Old Hermitage and the Small Hermitage. All of the art collected in the museum was confiscated along with numerous private collections by the Soviet government after the 1917 revolution. Also interesting, and a bit of juxtaposition is the story behind the “Hidden Treasure exhibition. This is a beautiful collection of paintings by the great masters that the Russian soldiers rescued from the Germans during WWII. It was kept in storage for over 50 years before it was opened and put on display in 1995. It was discovered at that time that this was artwork “stolen” by the German government from private collections in Germany, many of them owned by Jewish families. Our guide indicated that the German government had tried to get the artwork back, but that no claims had ever been made by any of the families. The Russians have kept the art. As we spent the day wandering through the various 400 exhibit halls and gilded salons we saw paintings, sculptures, and historical artifacts from Russia, Europe and Asia including artists such as Leonardo da Vince, Michelangelo, Raphael, Carravagio, Picasso, Van Dyk, Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, Matisse, Gauguin, Degas, Sisley, Renoir, Van Gogh and tons of others. But of everything we saw, one of the true delights and my absolute favourite was “The Peacock Clock”. This is a clock that was probably made by an Englishman named James Cox pre 1781. It consists of a gilded peacock on a branch, a rooster, an owl in a cage, a mushroom with a tiny dragon fly sitting on it and several other smaller animals such as squirrels. The mechanism is contained in the mushroom, and the movement process is started with the dragon fly. It activates once a week and then the peacock raises its head, spreads its tail, turns around, turns back, and closes its tail; the rooster crows 3 or 4 times; and the owl moves its head, blinks its eyes and moves its paws. It is absolutely delightful. The whole building with its elaborate central staircase is an amazing and splendid architectural and interior design feat. It is so elegant it is easy to imagine what life must have been like in the times when it was in use. You also realize the incredible wealth that must have existed amongst the elete in Russia and I think you can understand why the Bolsheviks revolted against the tsars. We just about made it to closing time at 6 pm and then walked back to our hotel past elegant buildings, over ornate bridges, and through small, lush green parks. I wanted to stop so many times to take pictures of everything I saw but we had to hurry as we were meeting Chris and Jon for our final dinner together.
We arrived back in time to change quickly before setting off in the opposite direction across another bridge into Petrograd Island and a small typically Russian restaurant. We had a good evening, then back to the hotel and bed around midnight.
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