Art Lovers!

Photo: Ross on the Jordan Steps - Hermitage Museum
Its been about a week or so since Ross and I went back to the Hermitage to see some more of the art and I have been wanting to brag about it ever since so here goes:
After finishing classes that morning (some days we have only two classes, one from 9:30 until 11 and another from 11:30 until 1pm) so we headed to the city centre and had a quick "business lunch" (even in Russia they call it this, just with an accent of course, but almost all of the cafes and restaurants here have "business lunch" specials) in a great sushi before heading to the Hermitage.
Once there, Ross was wanting to see some of the most famous rooms and architectural features of the building, so we headed to the Jordan Steps, the grandest of the many staircases of the building and then walked through a portion of the second floor, where instead of art they had some of the rooms set up and furished how they would have been when the last royal family was living there. Ross was also very interested to see the thrown room, the Concert Hall, and others, but unfortunately some of these were closed off. Likely this is because they were doing maintenance or something, since the majority of visitors come in the summer months now would probably be the best time to do any upgrading and what not.
After seeing these, and much of the art displayed in the rooms between these rooms, we wanted to find the more famous artworks that are apart of the collection. First we found Da Vinci - the Hermitage has two of his works, the Bennois Madonna and the Madonna Litta. Still hard to imagine that we were actually standing there and looking at Da Vinci's. Also near Da Vinci, were some works of a few other recognizable artists - a sculpture by Michalangelo, and two paintings by Raphael!
Eventually, we made our way to the third (and my favorite floor), where all of the 19th and 20th century paintings were. For me, many of the earlier paintings all look the same, but what makes them special is how old they are, whereas these more modern paintings I find absolutely stunning even if they are newer and less historic (I still think they are worthy of being called historic though). Ok so a quick run down of the people's art we saw, and perhaps a few of their titles, only the best ones though: *note* I am going to post a link to the bottom of this entry of the Hermitage Museum - on their website they have a fantastic Virtual Collection where you can search by artist, theme, type of artwork and view nearly every piece of art in the collection . . . trust me look up some of these guys! 1)Van Gogh - one of my top three (I still can't figure out who is my favorite out of these three) there were 4 or 5 of his pieces. Monet - (again top three) just something about the way Monet paints is emotional as well as beautiful and I am a sucker for landscapes. I love his -painting called "Lady in a Garden." Picasso - (last but not least of the top three) Ross bought me a print of my favorite of his works, I forget the name in English it only has it in Russian on the back of my copy but I believe it is called "the Dance of the Veils" (again check the website, it is from Picasso's famous Blue Period). Ross' favorite painting is one of Picasso's as well called "Composition with a Skull." There were at least a dozen of his paintings and some of his pottery as well. Mattisse - certainly not my favorite, but because his name is so well known, it was very interesting to see some of his paintings. Someone in the museum's history must have really liked his works too because there were as I recall two rooms containing his pieces. Also worth noting - Cezanne and Rodin: slightly lesser known possibly, but beautiful! To be honest we were looking at this part of the museum about an hour before it closed, so I rushed past a lot of the lesser known artists to get to the guys who I really wanted to see. I definitely plan to go back however and take a closer look at some of the things I skipped, and to appreciate my favorites again.

Just wanted to say lastly, sorry to anyone who is wanting to know more about life in Russia in general, or about school, etc. . . I do intend to write later on about Russian food, the Russian people, more about our residence building, and about St. Petersburg in general, but since there are over 400 museums and other important cultural sites in St. Petersburg I think many of our posts will be dominated by all the history we are able to re-live through these places. Count: 12 or so Historical Sites/Museums down 380 some-odd more to go! Except for ones like the Bread Museum, the Vodka Museum, the Communications Museum, the Antarctic Museum . . . I think we may be able to skip those.

link: http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/index.html
And once there, just click on the virtual collection menu and from there you can select to view art either by category, artist etc.