Military graphics, i.e. drawings and prints depicting the uniforms of troops from different countries, became a popular and widespread art form in the second half of the 18th and throughout the 19th century. The Hermitage collection of military drawings and prints is the world’s largest, totalling over 45,000 sheets.
Many members of the Russian Imperial family collected pictures that depicted the 18th – 19th century uniforms of the Russian army and foreign armed forces. The largest of such collections, which was later to enter His Majesty’s Own Library, belonged to Crown Prince Alexander Nikolayevich. Many historians, particularly those who wrote their regimental histories, would use those materials in their work.
The history of the development of reference books on Russian military uniform can be traced back to the “Description of the Full-Dress Uniform Embellishment Approved by His Imperial Majesty’s Instruction”, published presumably in St. Petersburg in 1762 and 1764. The publication consisted of 17 pages of text and 59 coloured plates of prints depicting full-dress uniforms and jackets for general field marshals, generals and officers of infantry and cavalry, as well as saddlecloths and saddle holsters.
The stock of military prints and drawings includes albums depicting the uniforms of most European states; some of them were presented to the Russian tsars by those countries’ rulers. The pride of the collection is the publication entitled “Survey of the Russian Army. From the Mid-Eleventh to the Early Nineteenth Century”, compiled under the supervision of A.N. Olenin and dedicated to Grand Dukes Nicholas Pavlovich and Michael Pavlovich.
The edition best known to the public is the four-volume publication called “Full-Dress Uniforms of the Russian Army” by L. Kiel and S. Schifliar, which comprises 703 lithographic sheets.
In the wake of the revolution of 1917, when the stock of the imperial libraries was distributed, the bulk of materials on the history of the military uniform were handed over to the Hermitage Museum, where they were divided between the Department of Western European Art and the Hermitage Library. The 1970s saw the commencement of work aimed at gathering these materials within a single source. At present the bulk of those engravings, lithographs and drawings representing the Russian and foreign uniforms constitute a fund incorporated in the Sector of Military Heraldry within the Arsenal Department. Scholarly research into this uniquely composed stock is continuing.
