G. A. MIROLIYUBOVA
The Hermitage collection of prints, one of the largest in the world, contains around 40,000 engraved and printed plates. It reflects all the stages in the development of this art form and represents its greatest achievements and the work of many Russian and European masters.
At the core of the collection are the engravings acquired by the Imperial Hermitage from the end of the 18th century onwards. These were private donations, either from the engravers themselves or from their publishers. In the 19th century the acquisitions became more regular. In the 1830s-1850s, the collection was augmented by the addition of important and numerous prints from the collections of A.I. Gassing and P.F. Karabanov. After the revolution of 1917, Russian prints from the collections of Yu.V. Iversen, A.A. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and some others were acquired by the Hermitage. In 1941, the main collection, already numbering many thousands of Russian engravings and lithographs, was further increased by the addition of 11,000 plates from the State Museum of USSR Ethnography and around two thousand from the Historical Museum of Artillery.
The earliest examples of woodcuts and metal engravings appeared in Russia in the middle of the 16th century with the introduction of book printing. During the first hundred and fifty years they mostly appeared in religious books. A new era started at the very end of the 17th century. Engravings of the time of Peter the Great were markedly secular in character. Dutch engravers A. Schoonebeek, H. Devit and P. Picart, invited by Peter the Great, along with their pupils I.F. and A.F. Zubov, A.I. Rostovtsev and others, made engravings commemorating battles, recording city plans and maps, featuring Peter himself and his associates and the views of the new Russian capital, St Petersburg.
In the period following Peter's reign, the function of Russian engravings changed sharply. The concerns of education and documentation gave way to the pomp and splendour of the mid-18th c. Baroque art. The new constellation of Russian engravers was headed by I.A. Sokolov, the most talented of them all. His brilliant engraved portraits of Empresses Anna and Elizabeth, made from original paintings by Louis Caravaque, set the standard for the representative images of these rulers. The engraved pictures of coronation festivities, triumphal parades and fireworks of the 1730s and 40s glorified the grandeur and splendour of the Russian Imperial court. The scale of construction in St Petersburg, its ornate baroque palaces, the grand design of the central embankments of the Neva and the width of its main avenues were captured by the masters of the Engraving Chamber at the Academy of Sciences: A.A. Grekov, E.G. Vinogradov, P.A. Artemyev and N.F. Chelnakov, who used the inspired drawings by the landscape artist M.I. Makhaev. The plan of St Petersburg published in 1753 became a monument to their remarkable achievements and a splendid example of Russian engraving art.
The beauty of St Petersburg's architecture and landscapes inspired many generations of Russian and European engravers. The Hermitage has an extremely full collection of views of the capital made in the late 18th-early 19th cc. in the aquatint and etching techniques by the English artist Th. Malton, Austrian landscape painters father and son Lory, and the Swedish artist B. Patersen who lived in St Petersburg for a long time. Their plates, painted in vivid watercolours, are priceless examples of landscape prints. Just as important are the views of Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof and other suburban parks made in the 1800s by the masters of the landscape engraving class at the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. Engravings by A.G. Ukhtomsky, S.F. Galaktionov and I.V. Chesky, based on the original paintings by S.F. Shchedrin, introduced the audience to a new stage in the development of landscape painting, influenced by the ideas and tastes of the Age of Sentimentalism.
The new technology of lithography, which came to Russia in the 1810s, allowed artists like A.O. Orlovsky, A.Ye. Martynov, K.P. Beggrov, F.-V. Perrot to immortalize the views of St Petersburg in the age of Pushkin and Gogol. The type-scenes by K.A. Zelentsov, I.S. Shchedrovsky, V.F. Timm and other contemporary genre artists reflected the transformation of street scenes into an independent genre in the middle of the 19th century. Series of tone and colour lithographs prepared by publishers I. Datsiaro and I. Velten in the 1840s-1860s continued to pay tribute to the historic centre of St Petersburg and its environs. At the turn of the 20th century, this topic also attracted the artists belonging to the "World of Art" movement, such as A.N. Benois, M.V. Dobuzhinsky, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva. Their works, "tinted with the shade of tender and perfect memory", became part of the city's pictorial history.
The Hermitage also possesses a large number of engravings showing other Russian cities, country estates and monasteries of the 18th and 19th centuries, which have often radically changed since then.
A very valuable section of the Hermitage prints collection contains around 20,000 engraved and lithographed portraits. The collection includes nearly all the engravers working in this genre from the second half of the 18th to the end of the 19th century. The most well-known artists are I.I. Kolpakov, Ye.P. Chemesov, I.A. Bersenev, G.I. Skorodumov, I.A. Selivanov, N.I. Utkin etc. Equally proficient in the various technologies of engraving and etching, these artists created exceptionally perceptive masterpieces reflecting the different characters they portrayed. As well as capturing their inner thoughts, their works are characterized by expressive individual features. The Hermitage has an exhaustive collection of Russian portrait lithographs. It contains early works by P.F. Sokolov, A.O. Orlovsky, the brothers A. and K. Bryullov, A.G. Venetsianov and many other artists who mastered the technique of painting on stone. Their portrait lithographs, as well as those by their followers V.I. Pogonkin, Ye.I. Geitman, A.F. Gippius, P.F. Borel, P.I. Smirnov, P.I. Razumikhin and many other 19th-century lithographers form a wonderfully diverse and valuable collection of portraits of important statesmen, writers, actors, artists and anonymous private persons. The portrait lithographs by V.A. Serov, A.N. Benois, B.M. Kustodiev and F. Malyavin represent the new artistic trends of the turn of the 20th century and the abiding interest in the refined and magical art of printed graphics.
