The General Headquarters of the State Hermitage Museum can be called one of the best museums not only in St. Petersburg, but throughout Russia. It is part of the Hermitage, and many tourists perceive it as an addition to the General collection of the Hermitage in the Winter Palace. However, the General Headquarters should be considered as a separate museum, in no way inferior to the General collection of the Hermitage or the Russian Museum.
On three floors of the General Headquarters Museum, interesting collections of paintings from different centuries and directions are collected, but the collections of paintings by impressionists, post-Impressionists, as well as artists of other trends of the 20th century have the highest artistic value. Previously, Impressionist collections of this level in Russia could only be seen in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. After the opening of the museum, the General Headquarters of the Hermitage, an even more valuable collection can be seen in St. Petersburg.
The building of the General Headquarters was built on the Palace Square in the period from 1819 to 1829. It took up an entire block. The length of the facades exceeds 500 meters. The beautiful arch of the General Headquarters and the strict classical look of the building made the Palace Square one of the most beautiful squares in the world. For more than a century, the General Headquarters of the Russian Army was located here. Nowadays, military structures are still located in the western wing of the General Headquarters.
The eastern wing of the General Headquarters (from the Moika River) was transferred to the Hermitage in the early 2000s and in 2013, after a long reconstruction, a museum was opened here. This part of the building is called the "Rossi Wing", in honor of the architect Carl Rossi, who built the General Headquarters. The entrance to the museum is under an arch.
The Hermitage General Headquarters Museum is as large as the Hermitage in the Winter Palace building. It is better to plan several hours for its visit.. Given the scale of the building, it has several courtyards, which are called atriums. Art objects have been installed in them, and a concert hall has been created in the largest atrium, where chamber concerts are held.
The General Headquarters Building has four floors. There are technical rooms on the lower floor, and art collections are located on three floors. The fourth floor is of the greatest interest, where 50 rooms feature paintings by Impressionists, post-Impressionists, as well as artists of the 20th century. Here you can see a large number of paintings by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissaro, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Vasily Kandinsky and many other world-famous artists.
This part of the museum is called the Gallery of Memory of Sergei Shchukin and the Morozov Brothers. Such a huge collection of Impressionists is their merit. Shchukin, during his trip to France, bought several dozen paintings for his Moscow mansion. According to his will, after his death, he gave 225 Impressionist paintings to the Hermitage. In some halls of the museum, the interiors of the houses of these collectors have been recreated.
The halls with paintings by the French artist Anti Matisse are of great interest. He was one of the most famous Art Nouveau artists in Europe. Sergei Shchukin bought 37 paintings from him, which became the largest collection of paintings by Henri Matisse in the world. He ordered several large canvases (the most famous of them "Dance" and "Music") from Matisse for his house in Znamensky Lane in Moscow. All these canvases can now be seen in the halls of the General Headquarters.
On the third floor of the General Headquarters, you can see several expositions: "Halls of memory of Carl Faberge", "Under the sign of the Eagle. Empire Art", "Museum of the Russian Guard", halls of French and Russian painting. Several halls of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire have been recreated on the third and second floors. On the second floor you can see the halls of Art Nouveau, Italian sculpture of the 20th century, Art of the peoples of Africa and porcelain plastics by Inna Olevskaya.
