The Hermitage Board of Trustees met recently to discuss preparations for the 250 the anniversary of the Museum’s foundation, which will take place in 2014. This will be a big event in Russia. By the Museum’s anniversary the renovation of the East wing of the General Staff Building – a magnificent building of c.1830, facing the Winter Place across Palace Square - will be finished and a new museum of art of the 19th-21st century will be opened in its interior (5 courtyards and 800 rooms). The Hermitage will become the largest museum in the world.

The Restoration and Storage Center at "Staraya Derevnya", unique in Russia for its advanced technology, is already working and a second phase was completed in 2012. By 2014 there will be new space for temporary exhibits in the Small Hermitage and new restoration laboratories at no. 30 Palace Embankment. By the 250th anniversary the interior of the church in The Winter Palace will be restored and all the museum’s permanent displays will have been renovated. Electronic catalogues of the museum’s collection and a new website will be under way.

This will be realised with substantial support from the Federal Government and a new Hermitage Endowment. The trustees debated how this should be achieved. Russia introduced a tax rebate for personal donations to charitable endowments in January 2012 and the State Hermitage Museum has been the first to pick up on this in the arts sector. The rebate is likely to make a significant difference to fundraising for the museum in 2013-14. The Hermitage Endowment is the largest cultural endowment in Russia, thanks to a donation from the Chairman, Vladimir Potanin.

© State Hermitage Museum and Royal Russia. 04 June, 2013

Crucially, the hotel will not be part of the Hermitage complex.

Guests will be able to use a shuttle service that will ferry them to the museum, and also book tickets for the Hermitage in the lobby – a short-cut which will save them a meeting with the gallery’s notoriously long queues (in which you can wait for up to two hours).

The hotel’s design will pay tribute to the Winter Palace portion of The Hermitage.

Employees will wear uniforms modelled upon the style that would have been sported by palace staff under the Tsar – while china based upon designs that would have been deployed for state banquets will be used in the restaurants.

The main restaurant will also be named after Catherine the Great, the fearsome empress who ruled Russia and its empire between 1762 and 1796, and founded the Hermitage in 1764.

© The Daily Mail (Condensed and edited by Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia) & State Hermitage Museum. 01 May, 2013

St. Petersburg's Hermitage museum has spent 68.4 million rubles in 2012 buying art works to enlarge its collections.

In 2011 the Hermitage spent 39.4 million and in 2010 75.4 million rubles for the purpose, the museum said in a statement.

"Madonna and Child" by Gaetano Gandolfi (1734-1802) and "Landscape with a shepherdess and her flock" by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712-1774) were last year's biggest acquisitions, with 5.5 million rubles paid for the former and 2 million for the latter.

"A view of the red study of Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna in the Anichkov Palace" by 19th-century painter Luigi Premazzi, a vase-shaped mantel clock by Robert Osmond made around 1760, and two ice-cream vases with lids dating to 1808 that belonged to Imperial Chancellor Count Nikolai Rumyantsev were other additions to the Hermitage collections in 2012.

"Currently, the expert purchasing commission comprises 19 people. The director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, is the chairman of the commission. A separate decision is made on the purchase of each item and on its purchasing price. On a compulsory basis, the museum seeks the approval of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for the acquisition of any item costing more than 100,000 rubles," it said.

The commission considers buying works offered for sale by Russian and foreign auction houses, antiquarians and private individuals.

The Hermitage permanently monitors the art market for any items that might be worth buying. It receives several offers by email daily.

Every Thursday, the museum's new acquisitions section holds its doors open to anyone who would like to offer something for sale. Priority attention is given to items that could be put on permanent display or fill gaps in current Hermitage collections.

The most expensive acquisitions are usually items bought for the western European arts departments, the Russian cultural history section, and the Orient unit.

All acquisitions for the modern art section are gifts, and the eastern Europe and Siberia archeological unit is mainly replenished with archeological finds.

Some of the most significant acquisitions in 2010 and 2011 were a china collection from Paris gallery Popoff & Co, "Hunters outside a tavern" by August Querfurt, and "Seaside view" by Antonio Marini.

© Rossiyskaya Gazeta. 25 March, 2013

Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum 

The world famous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is to have a new web site in 2014 when the museum will be 250 years old.

The site will be made in partnership with the IBM American company and implemented with sponsors’ money. This was reported to the RIA Novosti news agency by the Director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky.

The site of this museum was considered the world’s best for a long time. Now it takes second place but the museum hopes to return its leadership.

Piotrovsky described the digitalization of  the collection which is taking place along several tracks simultaneously. An electronic catalogue is already available for internal use and by 2014 all Internet users will have access to the digital collection.

© The Voice of Russia. 11 July, 2011