Masterpieces from the World’s Museums in the Hermitage

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has long hosted a series of intimate one-painting exhibitions under the title “Masterpieces from the World’s Museums in the Hermitage,” inviting major institutions around the globe to send a single outstanding work for an extended stay in one of the museum’s historic galleries. In the summer of 2016 the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main lent Vermeer’s The Geographer for three months, displaying it in the Hall of the School of Rembrandt within the New Hermitage. The exhibition was organised jointly by the two institutions and curated by Irina Alexeyevna Sokolova, Doctor of Culturology and Keeper of Dutch Painting in the Hermitage’s Department of Western European Art. A scholarly catalogue in Russian, written by Sokolova, was published by the State Hermitage Publishing House to accompany the display.

Painted around 1668 to 1669 and signed twice by the artist, the small canvas depicts a scholar in a fur-trimmed robe leaning over a table spread with charts and instruments, a large terrestrial globe beside him. The painting is generally paired with its companion piece The Astronomer, also dated 1668, though the two works have been separated since at least the early eighteenth century. The Hermitage visit marked the second time the picture had traveled to St. Petersburg as a temporary loan; it also carried a thread of Russian provenance, having passed through the hands of the industrialist Pavel Pavlovich Demidov, who sold it at the San Donato auction in Paris in 1880 before it eventually entered the Städel’s permanent collection in 1885.

For Russian visitors the exhibition offered a rare chance to stand before an autograph Vermeer. The Hermitage’s own Dutch holdings are exceptional, yet the museum owns no Vermeer of its own, making the series of loans an especially valued way to bring his work to St. Petersburg. The Geographer had previously featured in this same series, and the museum had earlier hosted Vermeer’s The Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum in 2011. Sokolova’s catalogue text placed the painting within Vermeer’s depictions of science and learning and surveyed its complex early ownership history.