Susan Jaques

Desperate for cash during the Great Depression, Joseph Stalin secretly sold part of his country’s cultural patrimony -- paintings, jewelry, and Faberge eggs -- to the highest bidders. Ignoring a trade embargo with the Soviet Union, U.S. treasury secretary Andrew Mellon struck a clandestine deal in 1930 to buy twenty-one masterpieces from the Hermitage. The septuagenarian art collector hid the paintings in the basement of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. before ultimately donating them to the National Gallery of Art, his gift to the nation. "Raiding the Hermitage" will explore this little-known purchase and the masterpieces that became part of the National Gallery's founding collection. The treasure trove of Old Masters includes five Italian Renaissance gems acquired by Catherine the Great and her grandsons Alexander I and Nicholas I: Botticelli's The Adoration of the Magi, Raphael's Alba Madonna and St. George and the Dragon, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, and Veronese's The Finding of Moses.