The greatest art collections of world class are awaiting you in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum:

Hermitage

The State Hermitage is one of the largest museums in the world. The museum's collections include about 3 million exhibits within 6 different departments: History of Russian Culture, Western European Art, as well as Prehistoric, Ancient, Oriental Art and Numismatics. The department of the History of Russian Culture and the Picture Gallery, which is registered as the world's largest in the Guinness Book of Records, are of particular interest and will be shown during the Hermitage Tour, which runs through 4 buildings of the Hermitage on the Palace Quay.

The department of the History of Russian Culture will present the stunning State Rooms of the Winter Palace of Russian Tsars, through which one gets into the most important of the 120 rooms in which the greatest masterpieces of Western European Art are housed. Here you will find nearly 17,000 paintings and more than 12,000 statues that belong to this department, masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, El Greco and many more.

Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and other Impressionists and Post-impressionists are situated in the General Staff Building (General Headquarters) separate from the main Hermitage complex.

In the Diamond Treasury of the Hermitage, you can also see particularly valuable items from the personal property of the Russian Tsars, such as the 46-piece toilet service of Empress Elisabeth made of pure gold or the two magnificent horse blankets and harnesses, one of them adorned with 8,000 brilliants, the other with16 000 diamonds. You will see further 1083 brilliants and 2458 diamonds in the mini copy of the Russian power insignia, made in 1900 by Fabergé.

The guided tour of the Hermitage without the Diamond Treasury and without the General Staff Building takes about 2-3 hours (this excursion is included in all our tours). The excursion of the Diamond Treasury takes about 1 hour, the tour inside General Staff Building Impressionist exhibition takes about 30-45 min (these are not included in our regular tour and can be requested at extra charge at the time of order). The Hermitage excursion goes well with the tour of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Vodka Museum, Church of the Resurrection or a Boat Trip.

The Russian Museum

The State Russian Museum is home to about 400,000 exhibits and is hereby of the largest collections of Russian Art in the world. The main building that houses the museum's collections is the Michael Palace, which was officially opened in 1898 after Nicholas II founded the Russian Museum in 1895.

The Art Gallery of the Russian Museum consists of about 15,000 items, including masterpieces by best Russian painters, such as Bryullov, Repin, Aivasovski, Serov, Ivanov, Kustodiyev, Kuinji, Petrov-Vodkin, Malevich and Kandinsky. The impressive iconography collection comprises of about 5,000 icons from the 12th-20th century, including works by Andrey Rublev. There are also many collections of applied art, with over 35,000 exhibits and folk art that covers all major types of folk craftworks, such as wood carving and wood painting, weaving, production of wooden and clay toys, metal works, embroidery, knitting, etc.

The guided tour of the Russian Museum takes about 2 hours; this excursion goes well with the tour of the Church of the Resurrection, a Boat Trip, a Metro Tour or the Alexander Nevsky Monastery tour.