The Hermitage guide

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The Hermitage, one of the oldest museums in the Soviet Union, has travelled the long road from a small picture gallery in the palace of the Russian Empress to a major national repository of art treasures and an important research and educational centre. Every year the Hermitage is visited by over three and a half million people.

The Museum occupies five buildings situated on the left bank of the Neva in the central part of Leningrad: the Winter Palace, built in 1762 by Francesco Bartolommeo Rastrelli; the Small Hermitage, designed in 1796 by Vallin de La Mothe; the Big (or Old) Hermitage, designed by Yuri Velten and completed in 1784; and the Hermitage Theatre, erected by Giacomo Quarenghi in the late 1780s and linked to the Big Hermitage by an arch over the Winter Canal. The New Hermitage was built in 1851 from a design by Leo von Klenze to accommodate the steadily growing collections of the Museum.

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