Fifteenth- to Seventeenth-century French Painting

For the first time in English, this lavishly illustrated catalogue presents thecollection of fifteenth- to seventeenth-century French paintings in the worldfamousHermitage Museum.Including many well-known works, notably those by Nicolas Poussin and ClaudeLorrain, this catalogue represents the first full publication in English of the wholeof the Hermitage Museum’s collection of French seventeenth-century paintings, aswell as seven paintings dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since thepublication of the Russian edition in 2018 the text has been considerably reworkedand supplemented, with new photography and the addition of one further painting. Itthus marks an important milestone in the history of the Hermitage Picture Gallery.The Hermitage collection of French painting is one of the largest and mostsignificant outside France. All the leading artists of the seventeenth century arerepresented and there are key works by some less famous names (for instance, signedpaintings by Pierre Cauchy and Jean Daret).This catalogue also throws light on the history of collecting in France and Russiafrom the seventeenth to early twentieth century. Paintings that were once in themost famous collections in France made their way to Russia from the middle of theeighteenth century. Catherine the Great acquired French seventeenth-century worksamong her first purchase of pictures in 1764; more than thirty arrived with the Crozatde Thiers collection that she bought in 1772, and sixteen arrived with Sir RobertWalpole’s collection from Houghton Hall in 1779. Four famous Claudes were boughtby Catherine’s grandson Alexander I from the estate of the late Empress Josephine atMalmaison in 1815.More than a third of the paintings arrived in the Hermitage after the Revolutionsof 1917, some from the collections of noble families established in the eighteenthcentury (the Yusupovs and the Stroganovs), others from more recent collectionsformed by statesmen and the growing wealthy middle class (Myatlev and Oliv). Manyof the works that arrived in the museum in the 1920s and 1930s had no establishedprovenance: as part of the research for this book, the author has worked with otherscholars at the Hermitage to discover the collections from which the paintingsderived.