The Hermitage has opened the exhibition "A Feat of Enlightened Philanthropy" for the 150th anniversary of the Central School of Technical Drawing, founded by Baron Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884), the greatest Russian banker of his age, who fi

The Hermitage has opened the exhibition "A Feat of Enlightened Philanthropy" for the 150th anniversary of the Central School of Technical Drawing, founded by Baron Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884), the greatest Russian banker of his age, who financed the state loans for the Crimean War and the building of the Nikolayevskaya Railway. In 1876 he gave a million roubles to the school, which trained artists for the manufactories and teachers of drawing, and then went on to invest sums many times greater than his original gift.
The real architect of the project was Stieglitz's son-in-law Alexander Polovtsov (1832-1909), the future Secretary of State and senator: he drew up the statutes, invited the architect Maximilian Messmacher (1842-1906) to serve as director, and for decades bought up tapestries, porcelain, glass, furniture and manuscripts all over Europe for the school's teaching museum.

By 1917 the school's collection exceeded 24,000 objects. In 1922 the school was closed, and it was revived in 1945; from 1953 it bore the name of Vera Mukhina, while the museum was made a branch of the Hermitage, into which the collections were eventually absorbed.

The exhibition in the Manege of the Small Hermitage shows more than 700 objects, including a series of sixteenth-century Brussels tapestries assembled for the first time after restoration. The exhibition runs until 4 October