Monet at The State Hermitage Museum
The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg holds a distinguished group of paintings by Claude Monet, and their history is as interesting as the pictures. They come from a moment when two Moscow merchants were buying French modern art faster and more boldly than almost anyone in Europe.
From Moscow merchants to the Winter Palace
Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov built extraordinary collections of French painting in the years before 1917, buying Impressionist and later modern works directly from Paris dealers. Their collections were nationalised after the revolution and eventually gathered into the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. When that museum was dissolved in 1948, its holdings were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, which is why the two institutions now share the story of Russian Impressionist collecting. Between them they hold one of the most important groups of French modern painting assembled anywhere before 1914.
The Hermitage’s Monets sit within one of the world’s great encyclopaedic museums, so they are seen in the company of Rembrandt, Titian and Matisse rather than in an Impressionist wing. The group includes garden and pond scenes from the 1870s, coastal and Seine landscapes, and views of London in fog from Monet’s Thames campaign, where the bridges dissolve into coloured vapour. Any painting shown below can be commissioned as a hand-painted oil reproduction on gallery-stretched canvas.
14 Monet works from The State Hermitage Museum
These paintings favour atmosphere over incident: mist, still water, gardens seen at a distance and light that has been filtered through something. They are quiet pictures, and quiet pictures are usually the ones people keep. A fog-bound Thames view brings depth to a narrow room without adding visual noise. The garden scenes carry more green and more warmth, and sit well against off-white or muted clay walls. Because the palettes are restrained, two or three of these hang together comfortably without competing. Take a look through the grid above, then explore the wider collection if you want to compare.
Official collection: The State Hermitage Museum