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.
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout was a Dutch Golden Age painter and a favourite student of Rembrandt. He was also an etcher, an amateur poet, a collector and an adviser on art.
Gerrit Dou, also known as GerardDouw or Dow, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, whose small, highly polished paintings are typical of the Leiden fijnschilders. He specialised in genre scenes and is noted for his trompe-l'œil "niche" paintings and candlelit night-scenes with strong chiaroscuro. He was a student of Rembrandt.
Isaac van Ostade was a Dutch genre and landscape painter.
Pieter Lastman (1583–1633) was a Dutch painter. Lastman is considered important because of his work as a painter of history pieces and because his pupils included Rembrandt and Jan Lievens. In his paintings Lastman paid careful attention to the faces, hands and feet.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.
Danaë is a painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn. It was first completed in 1636, but Rembrandt reworked it significantly by 1643 at the latest. Once part of Pierre Crozat's collection, it has been in the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia since the 18th century.
Jan Victors or Fictor was a Dutch Golden Age painter mainly of history paintings of Biblical scenes, with some genre scenes. He may have been a pupil of Rembrandt. He probably died in the Dutch East Indies.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The Return of the Prodigal Son is an oil painting by Rembrandt, part of the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It is among the Dutch master's final works, likely completed within two years of his death in 1669. Depicting the moment of the prodigal son's return to his father in the Biblical parable, it is a renowned work described by art historian Kenneth Clark as "a picture which those who have seen the original in St. Petersburg may be forgiven for claiming as the greatest picture ever painted".
Descent from the Cross (1634), by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, is one of his many religious scenes. The piece is oil on canvas and now located in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The piece is intriguing stylistically in its unique figural composition and variety of lighting effects. Aside from composition, the painting is notable in terms of its historical context, from the connection between its subject matter and Rembrandt's family situation to its endangered location during World War II.
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.
Portrait of Jan Six is a 1647 etching by Rembrandt, known in five states. It shows Jan Six, also the subject of a painted portrait by the same artist.
Courtesan at her Mirror or Young Woman with Earrings is a 1657 painting by Rembrandt. In 1781 it and 118 other works were sold by the Paris-based collector Sylvain-Raphaël de Baudouin to Catherine II of Russia via Melchior Grimm. It is now in the Hermitage Museum.
David and Uriah is a late, oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt, dated to around 1665 by the Hermitage Museum or c.1666–1669 in the 2015 Late Rembrandt exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. It shows the moment when David sends Uriah the Hittite to the front-line of the war with the Ammonites so that David can sleep with Uriah's wife Bathsheba. Uriah is identified as the foreground figure, with David and Nathan in the background. It was first given this title by Abraham Bredius in his catalogue of Rembrandt's work – this has been supported by several other scholars from 1950 onwards, including in a 1965 study by Madlyn Kahr.
Landscape with a Castle is an oil-on-panel painting by Rembrandt, now in the Louvre in Paris. Art historians have variously dated it to 1652, 1654, early 1640, 1648, 1640-1642, c.1640 and 1643–1646.
Pallas Athena is a c. 1657 oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt that belongs to the collection of Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
Portrait of Baertje Martens is a 1640 oil on oak panel portrait by Rembrandt, now in the Hermitage Museum after being acquired in Paris by Dmitri Alekseyevich Gallitzin for Catherine II of Russia. It is the pendant to the same artist's Portrait of Herman Doomer.
David and Jonathan is a painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt, made in 1642, now in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Painted on oak, it is one of the works, together with the Hellenistic sculpture acquired in 1850, The Venus de Taurida, with which the Hermitage began their collection in 1882.
Irina Vladimirovna Linnik was a prominent Russian art historian. Considered an icon in Dutch art history and a leading specialist in Western European painting, Linnik's work was mainly concerned with the identification and attribution of 17th-century paintings from the Low Countries, France and Italy. Over the course of her career she identified, attributed and re-attributed around 250 different paintings.
