What do you think?
Rate this book
The Hermitage
Examines the building and collections of the State Hermitage Museum, including paintings, sculpture, furniture, and jewelry.
143 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
2 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 15, 2020
Informative book.
The words and images often don’t align making it more difficult to follow along until you hunt down the picture being discussed.
Looking forward to my next visit to the Hermitage. I will see it with eyes that are more knowledgeable
The words and images often don’t align making it more difficult to follow along until you hunt down the picture being discussed.
Looking forward to my next visit to the Hermitage. I will see it with eyes that are more knowledgeable
March 23, 2017
Even more excited to visit the Hermitage now that I've read about it!
April 4, 2021
This book provides an excellent overview of the Hermitage - both the buildings themselves as well as the art within. The first third covers all of The Hermitage properties (The Winter Palace, the Winter Palace of Peter the Great, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the General Staff Building, Menshikov Palace, the Restoration and Storage Center in Staraya Derevnya, and the Imperial Porcelain Factory Museum) and showcases their history and some of the more noteworthy interiors. This was a great trip down memory lane, as I visited all of these museums in 2017 (the main complex in Palace Square several dozen times over eight months, in fact).
The final two-thirds focuses on the art collections and is organized geographically, highlighting works (primarily paintings) from Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Flanders, Holland, England, Germany, and Russia. These ~200 pages comes across as a thorough and entertaining survey of art history in western Europe over the last 500 years. The concluding sections - which feel a bit like an afterthought - touch on "primitive art", art of Classical Antiquity, and Eastern art. The pictures included throughout are beautiful, but occasionally smaller than I would prefer to see. Not everything mentioned in the text is illustrated, either.
Overall, this is one of the most engrossing souvenir books I've read, and it does an excellent - if necessarily superficial - job of covering what makes the Hermitage the finest museum in the world.
The final two-thirds focuses on the art collections and is organized geographically, highlighting works (primarily paintings) from Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Flanders, Holland, England, Germany, and Russia. These ~200 pages comes across as a thorough and entertaining survey of art history in western Europe over the last 500 years. The concluding sections - which feel a bit like an afterthought - touch on "primitive art", art of Classical Antiquity, and Eastern art. The pictures included throughout are beautiful, but occasionally smaller than I would prefer to see. Not everything mentioned in the text is illustrated, either.
Overall, this is one of the most engrossing souvenir books I've read, and it does an excellent - if necessarily superficial - job of covering what makes the Hermitage the finest museum in the world.
November 20, 2017
A good general introduction to the Hermitage and the major art works it contains.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews