World culture: The exhibition “The visit to Houghton. Walpole masterpieces from the Hermitage of Catherine the Great” in Great Britain

The exhibition “The visit to Houghton. Walpole masterpieces from the Hermitage of Catherine the Great” is presented from May 17 to September 29, 2013 at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK. The exhibition includes more than forty paintings from the collection of the Hermitage. The exhibition is complemented with paintings from the collections of the State Museum-Preserve “Tsarskoye Selo”, the State Museum “Pavlovsk”, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; the National Gallery, Washington; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and others.

The exhibition is timed to the 250th anniversary of the State Hermitage Museum, which will be celebrated in 2014.

The acquisition in 1779 of the collection of paintings of Walpole, which was called “the most famous in England”, was the most important event in the history of the Hermitage – the Imperial Gallery greatly enriched with outstanding works of European masters of the XVII century.

The buying of Walpole gallery had the same great importance for the formation of the Hermitage Art Gallery, as an acquisition in 1772 of Crozat collection in Paris. The Russian art historian V. F. Levinson-Lessing, author of the outstanding research on the history of the Hermitage, called the acquisition of the famous picture of Lord Walpole as “one of the biggest events in the life of the Hermitage”.

The upcoming exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see a part of a famous British collection at home of the collector.

Currently, the Hermitage has 126 paintings from the collection of Walpole. 15 paintings are in museums of Moscow, 21 - in museums around Russia and Ukraine, 6 paintings were sold in the 1930s abroad, the paintings that were in the museums of St. Petersburg suburb, disappeared during the German occupation during World War II. The fate of 36 paintings from the collection of the British collector is still unknown. The portrait of George I by G. Kneller and J. Wootton, who was in the palace in Gatchina, St. Petersburg suburb, and being between missing works, in 2002 returned to Russia by the German government.