The collection of French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries owned by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg justly ranks among the best in the world. The canvases represented in it were assembled, with some exclusions, by the Moscow art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Before 1948 the collections had been in the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow and after its closing they were divided between the State Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. In the late 1950s the masterpieces kept in the two collections began to be displayed in the rooms of the museums. The two collections, in St Petersburg and Moscow, equally superb in terms of quality, make up together a breath-taking panorama of French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The collection of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the Hermitage owes much of its significance to its amazing number of supreme examples of European painting. Worthy of special mention among them are "Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary" and "Girl with a Fan" by Auguste Renoir, "Haystack at Giverny" and "Poppy Field" by Claude Monet, "Village on the Seine" ("Villeneuve-la-Garenne") and "River Banks at Sainl-Mammes" by Alfred Sisley, "Boulevard Montmartre in Paris" by Camille Pissarro, the paintings "Girl at the Piano, Still Life with Curtain" and "Mont Sainte-Victoire" by Paul Cezanne, "Woman Holding a Fruit" by Paul Gauguin and "Lilac Bush" by Vincent van Gogh, numerous works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as paintings by Pierre Bormard, Albert Marquet, Maurice Vlaminck, Maurice Denis, Andre Derain and Kees van Dongen.
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