TheMilitary Gallery (Russian:Военная галерея) is a gallery of theWinter Palace inSaint Petersburg,Russia. The gallery is a setting for 332 portraits ofgenerals who took part in thePatriotic War of 1812. The portraits were painted byGeorge Dawe and his Russian assistantsAlexander Polyakov (1801–1835), aserf, andWilhelm August Golicke.
The top-lit,barrel-vaulted hall in which the gallery is accommodated was designed by architectCarlo 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 thepalace church. The gallery was opened in a solemn ceremony on 25 December 1826.
Less than ten years after its completion, it wasdestroyed by fire in 1837. The fire burned slowly and Dawe's portraits were saved from the flames. The architectVasily Stasov recreated the hall exactly as it had been before.
As a cadet of theNicholas Cavalry College [ru],Vladimir Littauer was posted in 1912 to stand night-time guard in the Military Gallery. He describes the experience as an eerie one, standing under the rows of portraits in the "huge hall" lit only by a single bulb over a cluster of banners. The isolation of the solitary sentry was emphasized by the two to three minutes that footsteps could be heard down halls and corridors before the replacement guard arrived in the gallery.[1]
During theSoviet era, the gallery collection was enhanced by four portraits ofPalace Grenadiers, the special ceremonial unit created in 1827 from veterans of the Patriotic War of 1812 to guard the entire building. The portraits were also painted by George Dawe, in 1828. More recently, the gallery acquired two paintings byPeter von Hess from the 1840s.
Today, as part of theHermitage Museum, this room retains its original decoration. Copies by Dawe and his workshop of the portraits of Boris Vladimirovich Poluektov, Dmitry Vladimirovich Golitsyn and Boris Vladimirovich Poluektov are now in the collection of thePushkin Museum.
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