The Breathtaking Hermitage Museum, Filled With Treasures Like the Kolyvan Vase and the Peacock Clock, First Opened to the Public on This Day in 1852

With exhibitions spanning nearly 720,000 square feet, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum is home to one of the largest known art collections. But the museum, which first opened its St. Petersburg doors to the public on February 5, 1852, originated with one woman with a powerful interest in the arts.

The museum’s origins date back to Russian Empress Catherine the Great, a lover of the arts who wrote plays and children’s literature. In 1764, nearly a century before the State Hermitage’s public opening, she founded the museum with an initial collection of paintings that included Rembrandt’s Descent From the Cross and Frans Hals’ Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Glove. These paintings—317 in total—prompted the empress to expand the Winter Palace, a building significant in its own right for housing Romanov family leaders, to make room for her growing collection.

Catherine’s collection soon ballooned as the empress amassed 4,000 paintings, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, and 16,000 coins and medals. She also added to the museum’s physical footprint. The State Hermitage Museum now consists of six main buildings including the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage, Hermitage Theater and the New Hermitage. Construction on the New Hermitage, designed by Leo von Klenze, ended in 1851. The museum officially opened its doors just a few months later. It is now home to a reported three million objects.

Though the name “hermitage” refers to the home of a recluse, the museum is anything but isolated. As the second-largest museum in the world, it is also one of the most visited. Visitors can study Iron Age artifacts from the Caucasus territories, an exact replica of the Gallery in Rome’s Papal Palace and one of the world’s largest collections of paintings from Flemish artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens.

Other noteworthy objects on display include the Kolyvan Vase—a 19-ton sculpture of solid jade that took 770 workers to install—and James Cox’s Peacock Clock, a lavish automaton featuring life-size gilded birds.

The Hermitage may be home to thousands of historical artifacts, but it is also home to more modern art and experimental temporary exhibitions. In 2013, for instance, the museum hosted “From Guercino to Caravaggio” to “cater for more refined tastes” of both “the masses and the ‘gourmets’” with works from famous Italian artists but also an exploration of a British collector of Italian art, Denis Mahon.

Thanks to another Russian empress, the museum has something else to offer: cats. Years after Catherine turned the Winter Palace into the palatial museum it is today, the empress Elizabeth I decreed that cats be brought from Kazan, nearly 1,000 miles southeast of St. Petersburg, to catch mice in its basement. Now, hundreds of years later, at least 50 cats remain under the care of Hermitage staff. The museum employs veterinarians and even a feline-focused press secretary. For some visitors, the elusive cats are far more interesting than the art itself, under the care of Hermitage staff. The museum employs veterinarians and even a feline-focused press secretary. For some visitors, the elusive cats are far more interesting than the art itself.