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he Hermitage Collection of British Painting comprising some 120 pictures is relatively modest among the Museum's much vaster collections. This disparity between British and Continental collections of sixteenth to nineteenth century art is characteristic of most European museums. Indeed, for a long time British art excited little interest on the continent and was not seriously or systematically collected. It is not surprising, therefore, that the celebrated collections purchased by the Hermitage in the second half of the eighteenth century in Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Geneva, did not contain pictures by British artists. Russia was probably the only European country to buy contemporary British paintings during the eighteenth century.

Technical Features: cloth bound volume (size 34 x 25 cm) with gold stamping on the front-board and on the spine and coloured dust jacket; 488 pages, 440 black and white illustrations. The volume is priced at $US245-.