Hermitage Rooms Hermitage Rooms The Hermitage Rooms was the name by which a series of rooms at Somerset House, London, were known from 2000 to 2007. During this period they were used as a venue for temporary exhibitions from the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The partnership with the Hermitage has since ended and the rooms are no longer known by this name, although they continue to house temporary exhibitions. The project was established in the 1990s under the direction of Lord Rothschild, and is funded by individual and corporate donors and admission fees. Several rooms in the south
Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings were made in the same period, notably the Codex Siniaticus from the Russian National Library, sold in 1933 to the British Museum (after 1973 British Library) for £100,000 raised by public subscription (worth £ in 2019), and "The Night Café" by Vincent van Gogh. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Parliament of the Russian Federation passed a new law prohibiting the sale of Russian art treasures to foreign countries. For many years the National Gallery was reluctant to lend the paintings it had bought from the Hermitage back to that Museum, for fear that the