International Day of the Friends of the Hermitage
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On 8 December 2018, the General Staff building was the venue for the celebration of the International Day of the Friends of the Hermitage, to which Friends of the museum from around the world are traditionally invited.
The official part of the event opened in the Atrium of the building with a formal welcome from Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, who told the Friends about the main events of the past year in the State Hermitage, introduced the delegations of Friends from Italy, the UK, Netherlands and USA who had come for the occasion and thanked those who had provided the museum with charitable assistance in 2018: the PRO ARTE St Petersburg Charitable Foundation for Culture and Art and Yelena Feodorovna Kolovskaya personally.
For the acquisition of a valuable exhibit for the Museum of the Guards – a casket presented by the officers of the Second Sofia Infantry Regiment to the regimental commander, Yegor (Georgy) Alexandrovich von Daehn in 1864 – Mikhail Borisovich presented personal Hermitage Friends’ Club cards to two members of the board of the St Petersburg English Assembly – Andrei Vitalyevich Drobotenko and Sergei Anatolyevich Tikhomirov.
Then the guests of the evening were offered a programme of entertainment featuring soloists from the Saint Petersburg State Academic Leonid Yacobson Ballet Theatre.
The Friends also viewed the new exhibitions in the General Staff building – “Tatiana Chapurgina’s Porcelain Fashion”, a display of gifts from the Potanin Foundation and “Delicate Designs. Fashion 1988–2018”. The festive evening ended with cocktails in the main vestibule.