The Hermitage Before Opening or After Closing

About the tour

The Hermitage receives more than three million visitors a year, and on an ordinary day you feel it in every room: a queue in front of the Litta Madonna, a guide you cannot hear along the enfilade, photographs full of the backs of other people’s heads. This tour solves the problem outright — you enter the museum when there is no one in it but the attendants.

There are two options: in the morning, before the official opening, or in the evening, after closing. The evening is the more striking of the two — low sunlight falls across the parquet and the marble columns, and the state rooms look as the imperial family saw them rather than as exhibition space.

The complex is six buildings on Palace Embankment, 365 halls and around three million objects. In three hours we take the principal route: the state interiors of the Winter Palace and the best of the painting collections.

What you will see

• The Jordan Staircase — Rastrelli’s baroque, gold, mirrors and a painted ceiling. After the fire of 1837 it was rebuilt by Vasily Stasov, who preserved his predecessor’s design.

• The state enfilade — the Field Marshals’ Hall, the Peter the Great Hall, the Armorial Hall and St George’s Hall, where state ceremonies and receptions took place. This is where the emptiness tells most.

• The 1812 Military Gallery — more than three hundred portraits of the generals who defeated Napoleon, by George Dawe and his workshop.

• The Pavilion Hall — crystal chandeliers, a mosaic floor, a view onto the Hanging Garden, and the Peacock Clock: James Cox’s mechanical automaton, Potemkin’s gift to Catherine II, and the only large eighteenth-century automaton to reach us in working order.

• Italian art — Leonardo’s Benois Madonna and Litta Madonna, Giorgione’s Judith, Caravaggio’s Lute Player, Titian, Raphael, Veronese, and the Crouching Boy, the only sculpture by Michelangelo in Russia.

• The Raphael Loggias — an exact copy of the Vatican gallery, commissioned by Catherine II and reproduced on the banks of the Neva down to the last biblical scene on the vaults.

• The Spanish and Dutch schools — El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya; and the Rembrandt room with the Return of the Prodigal Son.

Why it is worth it

The difference is not only comfort. An empty Hermitage shows you what daylight hours hide: the enfilades run clear to the eye the whole way through, exactly as intended, your footsteps echo on the parquet, and you can stand in front of the Leonardos as long as you like and talk to your guide in a normal voice.

Your guide supplies what the labels do not: how the whole Winter Palace burned out over a few days in December 1837 and why it was rebuilt in fifteen months; how more than a million objects were evacuated in the first weeks of the war, while tours of the empty frames were given from memory in besieged Leningrad; what left the collection through Western auction houses in the 1930s; and why the palace cellars are still guarded by cats, on the museum’s staff since the reign of Empress Elizabeth.

The tour is private and tickets are included. This kind of access is arranged by advance request and on limited dates — please book well ahead.