The State Hermitage Museum (Gosudarstvennyj Èrmitaž) in Saint Petersburg, Russia is the largest museum in the world, with 3 million works of art (not all on display at once), and one of the oldest art galleries and museums of human history and culture in the world. The vast Hermitage collections are displayed in six buildings, the main one being the Winter Palace which used to be the official residence of the Russian Tsars. International branches of The Hermitage Museum are located in Amsterdam, London, and Las Vegas.

Strong points of the Hermitage collection of Western art include Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Canova, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. There are several more collections, however, including the Russian imperial regalia, an assortment of Fabergé jewellery, and the largest existing collection of ancient gold from Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

Catherine the Great started the famed collection in 1764 by purchasing more than two hundred paintings in Europe. Russian ambassadors in foreign capitals were commissioned to acquire the best collections offered for sale: Brühl's collection in Saxony, Crozat's in France and the Walpole gallery in England. Catherine called her art gallery my hermitage, as very few people were allowed within to see its riches. In one of her letters she lamented that "only the mice and I can admire all this." She also gave the name of the Hermitage to her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787.

The imperial Hermitage was proclaimed private property during the Revolution. The range of its exhibits was further expanded when public art collections were being nationalized. Particularly notable was the influx of modern art from collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. New acquisitions included most of Gauguin's later oeuvre, 40 works of Cubistic works by Picasso, and such icons of modern art as Matisse's La danse and Vincent van Gogh's Night Cafe.

The Soviet government did not pay much attention to maintenance of "bourgeois and decadent" art. Stalin ordered some of the most precious Hermitage works to be sold abroad. These included unqualified masterpieces like Raphael's Alba Madonna, Titian's Venus with a Mirror and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. Acquired by Andrew W. Mellon, most of these works formed a nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. There were other losses, though works of their kind are more abundant: thousands of works were moved from the Hermitage collection to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and other museums across the USSR. Some of the collections were also lost to enemy shelling during the Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, when the building was used as an air-raid shelter.