5 Masterpieces from the Hermitage

The State Hermitage Museum / Государственный Эрмитаж has been open to the public since 1852.

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.

Caravaggio | Lute-Player, 1595-1596

"The Lute-Player", painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in 1595-96, is the only work by the famous master in Russia and it is considered without any exaggeration to be one of the gems of the Hermitage Museum collection.

The Hermitage painting is known to have belonged to Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani.

The Giustiniani collection was put up for sale in Paris and came into the Hermitage in 1808 through the mediation of the director of the Louvre, Dominique Vivan Denon. | © Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) (1571-1610) | The Lute Player, 1596 | Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Edmé Bouchardon | Cupid cutting his bow from the club of Hercules, 1750

Cupid cutting his bow from the club of Hercules (L'Amour se taillant un arc dans la massue d'Hercule) is a marble statue created by the sculptor Edmé Bouchardon (French sculptor, 1698-1762 in 1750 and currently preserved at the Musée du Louvre.

Born at Chaumont, Edmé Bouchardon became the pupil of Guillaume Coustou and gained the Prix de Rome in 1722.

Resisting the barocchetto tendency of the day he was classic in his taste, pure and chaste, always correct, charming and distinguished, a great stickler for all the finish that sandpaper could give.

Edmé Bouchardon | Cupid cutting his bow from the club of Hercules, 1750 (detail) | Musée du Louvre

5 Important artworks at the Tate Gallery

Tate is a family of art galleries in London, Liverpool and Cornwall, known as Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool + RIBA North.

When Tate first opened its doors to the public in 1897 it had just one site, displaying a small collection of British artworks.

Today we have four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks.

Henri Matisse | Reading Woman with Parasol, 1921 | Tate

Matisse painted this work while renting a house near Nice in the South of France.

The relaxed, relatively naturalistic style is typical of his work of the early 1920s.

It was bought by the Contemporary Art Society in 1926 with the intention of presenting it to the Tate Gallery.

Matisse wrote that the painting ‘will represent me as well as possible - moreover, I think that it will not frighten the acquisitions committee of the Modern Museum in London'.

In fact, the Tate initially turned it down, but accepted it in 1938.| Source: © Tate

Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) | Reading Woman with Parasol, 1921 | Tate Collection

Camille Claudel (1864-1943)

Camille Claudel was a French sculptor and graphic artist.

In 1882 the sculptor Auguste Rodin agreed to supervise a small group of young women students, one of whom was the seventeen-year-old Camille Claudel.

Auguste and Camille fell in love almost at first sight.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard | Rococo painter

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), French Rococo painter whose most familiar works, such as The Swing (1767), are characterized by delicate hedonism.

Fragonard was the son of a haberdasher’s assistant. The family moved to Paris about 1738, and in 1747 the boy was apprenticed to a lawyer, who, noticing his appetite for drawing, suggested that he be taught painting.

François Boucher | Rococo painter

François Boucher (1703-1770) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style.

Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes.

He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.

Il Valzer | La danza proibita

Avvicinati al tuo partner, conta "Uno, due, tre, Uno, due, tre" nella tua testa e vai!

Anche se nel XVII e XVIII secolo, il valzer era considerato la radice di tutti i mali, si è fatto strada tra le élite ed è oggi il più popolare di tutti i balli da sala.

A causa della sua presa ravvicinata e delle rotazioni veloci, un tempo il valzer veniva chiamato la "danza proibita".

Camille Claudel | La Valse, 1891

Johann Sebastian Bach: "La musica aiuta a non sentire dentro il silenzio che c’è fuori"!

• "Tre cose sono necessarie per un buon pianista: la testa, il cuore e le dita".

• "La perfezione si raggiunge per gradi".

• "Ai miei occhi ed alle mie orecchie l’organo è il re di tutti gli strumenti".

• "La musica non è nelle note, la musica è tra le note".

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• "Buffone è chi non ride mai".

• "Ogni difficoltà su cui si sorvola, diventa un fantasma che turberà i nostri sonni".

Johann Sebastian Bach (1714-1788), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) e Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Angelica Kauffmann | Neoclassical painter

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) was a painter in the early Neoclassical style who is best known for her decorative wall paintings for residences designed by Robert Adam.

The daughter of Johann Joseph Kauffmann, a painter, Angelica was a precocious child and a talented musician and painter by her 12th year.

Her early paintings were influenced by the French Rococo works of Henri Gravelot and François Boucher.

Mary Moser | Painter and a Founding of the Royal Academy

Mary Moser RA (1744-1819) was an British painter and one of the most celebrated female artists of 18th-century Britain.

One of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 (along with Angelica Kauffmann), Moser painted portraits but is particularly noted for her depictions of flowers.

Sebastiano Ricci | Baroque painter

Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734) was born in Belluno. At the age of fourteen, Sebastiano Ricci left his birthplace for Venice, where he soon entered the studio of Federico Cervelli (1625 - before 1700), a Milanese painter active there since the mid-1650s.

While contemporary biographers sometimes discounted Sebastiano's debt to Cervelli, modern scholars generally agree that the Milanese master gave him solid practical instruction and introduced him to the Venetian painters of the seventeenth century.

Marco Ricci | Baroque painter

Marco Ricci (1676-1730) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Early years

He was born at Belluno and received his first instruction in art from his uncle, Sebastiano Ricci, likely in Milan in 1694-6.

He left for Venice with his uncle in 1696, but had to flee the city.

He visited Rome, where he was for some time occupied in painting perspective views.

Bernardo Bellotto | Veduta painter

Bernardo Bellotto (1721-1780) was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities - Dresden, Vienna, Turin and Warsaw.

He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto.

Thomas Lawrence | The Red Boy, 1825

This portrait of Charles William Lambton - aged six or seven - was commissioned by the boy's father John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, a Whig politician and MP for County Durham.

Popularly known as The Red Boy, it remained in the Lambton family until it was acquired by the National Gallery in 2021.

It is acknowledged as one of Thomas Lawrence's (1769-1830) masterpieces and, a sign of the image's enduring popularity, it was the first painting to be reproduced on a British postage stamp in 1967.

Rosalba Carriera | Rococo painter

Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757), a Venetian Rococo painter, was best known for her innovative approach to pastels, which had previously been used for informal drawings and preparatory sketches.

She was also credited with pastel as a medium for serious portraiture that redefined the Rococo manner.

In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures.

Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe.

Giovanna Fratellini | Baroque painter

Giovanna Fratellini (1666-1731) was a Florentine artist during the Baroque period.

Born in Florence as Giovanna Marrmocchini Cortesi, she married Guiliano Fratellini in 1685 and changed her name to Fratellini.

This well-born woman pastellist was a lady-in-waiting to Vittoria della Rovere, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Barbara Krafft | Portrait painter

Maria Barbara Krafft (1764-1825) was an Austrian painter, best remembered today for her widely reproduced posthumous portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

She was born in Iglau (now Jihlava, in the Czech Republic) where her father, the Austrian Imperial court painter Johann Nepomuk Steiner, was working at the time.

She was taught painting by her father and accompanied him to Vienna, where she exhibited her first painting in 1786 at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Barbara Krafft | Posthumous Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Salzburg, 1756 - Vienna, 1791), 1819

Jean-Etienne Liotard | Orientalist Pastel painter

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, Seated on a Sofa, 1752 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Etienne Liotard was a widely traveled artist whose French Huguenot family had settled in Geneva, where he was born, owing to the passage of the Edict of Nantes.

From 1738 to 1742 he lived in Istanbul (Constantinople) and thereafter painted genre scenes of non-Muslim women in Turkish costume, such as this one, which were greatly admired throughout western Europe.

In pastel, his technique is colorful and exceptionally smooth and flawless.

Jean Etienne Liotard | Woman in Turkish Dress, seated on a Sofa, 1752 (pastel over red chalk underdrawing on parchment) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rachel Ruysch | Baroque painter

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), who has been called the "most celebrated Dutch woman artist of the 17th and 18th centuries", was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch moved to Amsterdam with her family when she was three.

Her maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist from whom she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy.

Maria Sibylla Merian | Baroque Era Illustrator

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator.

She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family.

Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel.

Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675.