Last updated The Alba Madonna by Raphael, was bought for the Hermitage by Emperor Nicholas I of Russia in 1836. It was sold to Andrew Mellon by the Soviet Government in 1931 for $1,166,400, the largest sum ever paid for a painting until that time.
In the late 1920s, the Soviet government urgently needed foreign currency to finance the rapid industrialization of Russia ordered in the first Five Year Plan. The government had already sold off collections of jewelry, furniture and icons seized from the Russian nobility, wealthy classes, and the church.
In February 1928, the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, along with the Russian Museum, was ordered to make a list of art works worth at least two million rubles, for export. A special agency called 'Antiquariat' was created under the Narkompros (the People's Commisariat of Enlightenment) and opened an office in Leningrad to oversee the sale. The Hermitage was instructed to sell 250 paintings for at least 5000 rubles each, plus engravings and a number of golden treasures from ancient Scythia.
The sale was secret, but word was quietly spread to selected western art dealers and collectors that the paintings were on the market.
The first foreign buyer to purchase Hermitage paintings was Calouste Gulbenkian, the founder of the Iraq Petroleum Company, who began buying paintings in early 1930, trading them for oil with the Russians. These works later formed part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, in Lisbon. However, the organizers of the sale were dissatisfied with the amounts they received from Gulbenkian, so they looked for other buyers.
Saint George and the Dragon, by Raphael, was purchased for the Hermitage by Catherine the Great in 1772, and later hung in the gallery of portraits of the generals who had defeated Napoleon. It was sold to Andrew Mellon in 1931.
Andrew Mellon was an American banker, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, art collector, and, at the time, American Ambassador to Great Britain. He conceived the idea of founding an art museum for the United States modeled after the National Gallery, London. He heard about the secret Hermitage sale from Knoedler and Company of New York, dealers which he regularly used for his art purchases.[2]
Franz Zatzenstein-Matthiesen, a young German art dealer, had been asked by the Soviet Government to compile a list of the hundred paintings in Russian collections, which should never be sold under any circumstances. He was surprised soon afterwards to find several of the paintings on his list were in Paris, purchased by Gulbenkian. Gulbenkian asked him to act as his agent on further purchases, but Matthiesen instead formed a consortium with Colnaghi's of London and with the firm patronized most by Mellon, Knoedler's.[3] In 1930 and 1931 the consortium bought twenty-one paintings from the Soviet government, which they offered to Mellon, who had the right of first refusal.[4] By the end of 1931, Mellon had acquired twenty-one paintings for a total price of $6,654,000. They included van Eyck's Annunciation and Raphael's Alba Madonna. The latter painting was sold for $1,166,400, the largest sum ever paid for a single painting until that time. The consortium sold several other paintings to other clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The sale remained secret until November 4, 1933, when it was reported in The New York Times that several Hermitage paintings, including the Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych by van Eyck, had been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum.
The sales came to an end in 1934, possibly as a result of a letter to Stalin from the deputy director of the Hermitage, Joseph Orbeli, protesting the sale of Russia's treasures. The director of the Hermitage, Boris Legran, who had been brought to the museum to conduct the sale, was dismissed in 1934 and replaced by Orbeli.
In 1937, Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings, along with the money to build a National Gallery of Art to house them, to the United States Government. The paintings were, and would remain, the kernel of the National Gallery of Art collection.
For many years the National Gallery of Art was reluctant to lend the paintings it had bought from the Hermitage back to that Museum, for fear that the Russian government would keep the paintings in Russia. That policy changed after 1990, when Mikhail Piotrovsky became director of the Hermitage. A number of the National Gallery paintings have been loaned to the Hermitage, including Venus with a Mirror by Titian, at the time of the first visit of the President George W. Bush to St Petersburg in 2002.
Timeline
February 1928
Hermitage ordered to prepare list of paintings for sale.
The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 10th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022.
The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum houses one of the world's most important private art collections. It includes works from Ancient Egypt to the early 20th century, spanning the arts of the Islamic World, China and Japan, as well as the French decorative arts, the jewellery of René Lalique and some of the most important painters of all times works such as Rembrandt, Monet, Rubens, Manet, Renoir, Degas and Turner.
The Alte Pinakothek is an art museum located in the Kunstareal area in Munich, Germany. It is one of the oldest galleries in the world and houses a significant collection of Old Master paintings. The name Alte (Old) Pinakothek refers to the time period covered by the collection—from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. The Neue Pinakothek, re-built in 1981, covers nineteenth-century art, and Pinakothek der Moderne, opened in 2002, exhibits modern art. All three galleries are part of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, an organization of the Free state of Bavaria.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of Western art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.
The Annunciation is an oil painting by the Early Netherlandish master Jan van Eyck, from around 1434–1436. The panel is housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It was originally on panel but has been transferred to canvas. It is thought that it was the left (inner) wing of a triptych; there has been no sighting of the other wings since before 1817. The Annunciation is a highly complex work whose iconography is still debated by art historians. It was bought by the Tsar of Russia for the Hermitage Museum, but was sold by Stalin's government in 1930.
Fourteen Rembrandt paintings are held in collections in Southern California. This accumulation began with J. Paul Getty's purchase of the Portrait of Marten Looten in 1938, and is now the third-largest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the United States. Portrait of Marten Looten is now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
St. George and the Dragon is a small oil on wood cabinet painting by the Italian High Renaissance artist Raphael, painted c. 1505, and now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The saint wears the blue garter of the English Order of the Garter, reflecting the award of this decoration in 1504 to Raphael's patron Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, by King Henry VII of England. The first word of the order's motto, "HONI" can be made out. The painting was presumably commissioned by the Duke, either to present to the English emissary who brought the regalia to Urbino, Sir Gilbert Talbot, or to Henry himself—recent scholarship suggests the latter. The honour paid to a minor Italian ruler reflected Henry's appreciation of the cultural prestige of Renaissance Italy as much as any diplomatic purpose.
A Man with a Quilted Sleeve is a painting of about 1510 by the Venetian painter Titian in the National Gallery, London, measuring 81.2 by 66.3 centimetres. Though the quality of the painting has always been praised, there has been much discussion as to the identity of the sitter. It was long thought to be a portrait of Ariosto, then a self-portrait, but since 2017 has been called Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo by the gallery, having also been called merely Portrait of a Man, the title used here, The Man with the Blue Sleeve, and no doubt other variants.
Venus with a Mirror is a painting by Titian, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and it is considered to be one of the collection's highlights.
Colnaghi is an art dealership in St James's, central London, England, which is the oldest commercial art gallery in the world, having been established in 1760.
The Walpole collection was a collection of paintings and other works of art at Houghton Hall in Norfolk and at other residences of Sir Robert Walpole. Many of the important works were sold in 1779 to Catherine the Great of Russia, and the Hermitage Museum still owns more than 120 works from the collection.
A Polish Nobleman is a 1637 painting by Rembrandt depicting a man in a costume of Polish szlachta (nobility). The identity of the subject of the painting is unclear, and has given rise to several different interpretations. The view that the figure's dress is clearly Polish is not universally held and it may have been a self-portrait.
Flora or Saskia as Flora is a 1634 oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt, depicting his wife Saskia van Uylenburgh as the goddess Flora. It is held by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Penelope Curtis is a British art historian and curator. Fom 2015 to 2020 she was the director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, and from 2010 to 2015 director of Tate Britain. She is the author of several monographs on sculpture and has written widely at the invitation of contemporary artists.
Arthur Joseph Sulley was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn's The Mill.
Everhard or Eberhard Jabach was a French businessman, art collector, and director of the French East India Company. He was born in Cologne in the Holy Roman Empire but later naturalised as a French subject.
Pallas Athena is a c. 1657 oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt that belongs to the collection of Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
The Finding of Moses is an oil on canvas painting by Paolo Veronese, from c. 1581-1582. It is held in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C..
↑ Metzger, Bruce M.; Ehrman, Bart D. (2005). The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4thed.). New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.64.
Bibliography
Selling Russia's Treasures by Nicholas Iljine, Natalia Semenova and Amir G. Kabiri (project directors). MTA Publishing (The M.T. Abraham Foundation), Paris-Moscow, 2013.
Prodannye Sokrovishcha Rossii (lit. The Sold Treasures of Russia) by Nicholas Iljine and Natalia Semenova (project directors). Russkiy Avantgard publishers, Moscow, 2000.
Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. Harry Abrams, New York, 1991.
Serapina, N. Ermitazh kotory my poteryali (lit. The Hermitage which we lost.) Neva, Number 3, 1999.
Walker, John, The National Gallery, Washington. Thames & Hudson, London, 1964.
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