Hermitage Revealed Hermitage Revealed Hermitage Revealed is a documentary film directed by Margy Kinmonth and produced by Foxtrot Films Ltd which tells the story of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg - formerly a royal palace and now one of the largest and most visited museums in the world. Holding over 3 million objects and with more curators than any other museum, the exhibits go back to Catherine the Great. Celebrating the museum's 250th anniversary in 2014, the film shows how the collection came about, how it survived revolutionary times and what makes the Hermitage Museum unique today. This documentary feature
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