Masterpieces of the Hermitage | Netherlandish Painting - The Discovery of Realism (Episode 2)

The Hermitage has one of the world’s largest collections of Dutch seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting. Today it consists of over one and a half thousand pictures. Many of the masterpieces, by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Paulus Potter, Frans van Mieris, Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch, a diptych (1430s) by Robert Campin (Master of Flemalle), considered to be one of his masterpieces; St Luke Drawing the Virgin by Rogier van der Weyden; and The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho (1531) by Lucas Van Leyden.

The exhibition of Dutch painting is one of the largest in the Hermitage collection. It occupies six rooms on the first floor in the New Hermitage. Being the largest in area, the Tent- Roofed Hall represents the diversity of genres practiced in 17th-century Dutch art. Exhibited here are the works by the famous landscape artists Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, the genre painters Jan Steen, Gerard Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, the animalist Paulus Potter, the masters of still-life painting Willem Claesz Heda and Willem Kalf. The portraits by Frans Hals are on view as well. A separate room displays the works by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Hermitage boasts the largest collection of works by the great Dutch artist, which is represented by paintings on biblical and mythological subjects, as well as by portraits.

Among its examples of the German school of the Northern Renaissance, the museum also has a rare work (Portrait of a Young Man) by the talented German portraitist Ambrosius Holbein, elder brother of Hans Holbein, as well as five works by the celebrated German portrait painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, including his masterpieces Venus and Cupid (1509) and The Virgin and Child under an Apple Tree (c.1525), together with the beautiful Portrait of a Lady (1526).

16th-century portraiture includes the Portrait of Palatine Otheinrich (1540s) by the painter and engraver Georg Pencz, a pupil of Albrecht Durer, and a characteristic twin portrait, by Christoph Amberger.