Military Gallery of The Winter Palace

The Military Gallery (Russian: Военная галерея) is a gallery of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The gallery is a setting for 332 portraits of generals who took part in the Patriotic War of 1812. The portraits were painted by George Dawe and his Russian assistants Alexander Polyakov and Wilhelm August Golike.

The top-lit barrel-vaulted hall in which the gallery is accommodated was designed by architect Carlo Rossi and constructed from June to November 1826. It replaced several small rooms in the middle of the main block of the Winter Palace - between the White Throne Hall and the Greater Throne Hall, just a few steps from the palace church. The gallery was opened in a solemn ceremony on 25 December 1826.

Less than ten years after its completion, it was destroyed by fire in 1837. The fire burned slowly and Dawe's portraits were saved from the flames. The architect Vasily Stasov recreated the hall exactly as it had been before.

During the Soviet era, the gallery collection was enriched with four portraits of palace grenadiers, the special troops created in 1827 to guard the house for veterans of the Patriotic War. The portraits were also painted by George Dawe, in 1828. More recently, the gallery acquired two paintings by Peter von Hess from the 1840s.

Today, as part of the State Hermitage Museum, this room retains its original decoration.

  • Monarchs

  • Alexander I of Russia

  • Francis II of Austria

  • Frederick William III of Prussia

  • Generals

  • Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly

  • Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich of Russia

  • Mikhail Kutuzov

  • Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

  • Pyotr Bagration

  • Yakov Kulnev

  • Mikhail Vorontsov

  • Ivan Paskevich

  • Aleksey Yermolov

  • Matvey Platov

  • Peter Volkonsky

  • Levin August von Bennigsen

  • Mikhail Miloradovich

  • Hans Karl von Diebitsch

  • Nikolay Raevsky

  • Alexander Tormasov

  • Guillaume de Saint-Priest

  • Adam Ożarowski

  • Valerian Madatov

  • Fabian Wilhelm von Osten-Sacken

  • Antoine-Henri Jomini

  • Peter von Wittgenstein

  • Leopold von Saxen-Koburg

  • Alexander Ivanovich Ostermann-Tolstoy

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    “Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
    —Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)

    “To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning round.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    “One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what the fishermen did in the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a- visiting, sit about, and tell stories, though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a long vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been there in winter to hear their yarns.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)