Catherine Phillips, 1963-2026

(This is a translation (and adaptation) of an unsigned obituary posted by the European University at Saint Petersburg.)

On May 22, 2026, after a serious illness, Catherine Victoria Phillips died—or Katia Phillips, as she always introduced herself and as everyone at the Hermitage called her. For over thirty years, her life and professional activities were inseparably linked with the Hermitage, where she left an indelible mark.

Catherine Phillips was born and raised in Shropshire, England. In 1984 she graduated with honours from the Courtauld Institute in London with a specialisation in medieval art, and was invited to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But by the end of 1985, she decided (as she put it) to broaden her horizons and set off for the USSR, where she learned to speak Russian within two years, subsequently developing an astonishing ease and fluency. For several years she mainly worked with foreign television and film crews at a time when many sought to document a culture that had long been closed to them, then to capture the rapidly changing scene as the end of the Soviet Union led to a new era.

Catherine arrived at the Hermitage in the summer of 1994 as a research assistant to the English journalist Geraldine Norman, helping to gather materials for her book The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum. This was a turning point in Catherine’s life. Gifted with a lucid mind, inner discipline, and a tremendous capacity for work, she became an indispensable part of key museum projects of those years. Catherine actively contributed to the launch and ongoing operation of the Hermitage Rooms exhibition centre at Somerset House in London, worked on the organising committee of the international architectural competition for reconstructing the General Staff Building on Palace Square, and facilitated joint projects with the British Friends of the Hermitage. However, purely administrative and organisational roles were not for her. Catherine’s primary work became translating and preparing the museum’s exhibition and scholarly catalogues for publication, which invariably bear the stamp of her firm, intelligent, and tactful editing. Anyone who has read a Hermitage publication in recent decades has read Catherine’s work; any scholar who has travelled to Saint Petersburg for research on the history of art has almost certainly benefitted from her generosity.

In her scholarship, Catherine’s main subject of study was the Hermitage collection of western European drawings. In 2006 she began studying the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl—a group of 4,000 original drawings of all European schools, which Empress Catherine II had acquired in Brussels in 1768. Meticulous research in Belgian archives holding Cobenzl’s personal correspondence—which required deciphering hundreds of pages of 18th-century French and German cursive—led to truly significant discoveries. This work served as the basis for Catherine’s Ph.D. dissertation, Art and Politics in the Austrian Netherlands: Count Charles Cobenzl (1712–1770) and his Collection of Drawings, which she defended in 2013 at the University of Glasgow. Catherine continued her work compiling a full scholarly catalogue of Cobenzl’s collection until her final days. She was also cataloguing the drawings collection of Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich Golitsyn (1721–1793), whose approximately 300 paintings and 4,000 drawings are now scattered across institutions in Europe and the United States. At the same time, Catherine published numerous articles, both attributions of drawings and essays addressing broader issues related to drawing collections in the eighteenth century. Her scholarship appeared in the pages of leading professional journals, including Oud Holland, Master Drawings, Print Quarterly, Monte Artium, and Les Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Art, as well as conference proceedings published in Russia and elsewhere. She received fellowships from the Frick Center for the History of Collecting (New York) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), among other institutions, to support her research. Catherine’s publications established her reputation in the international community as a recognised specialist in the field.

Catherine began her teaching career in the fall of 2019 at the European University at St. Petersburg. By the end of the semester, she was granted a named position that reflected her scholarly interests, the Vladimir Levinson-Lessing Professor of the History of Collecting. Despite the brevity of Catherine’s time at the university, she managed to train several dozen brilliant specialists. She continued to advise and support her students even after their graduation. In the university’s Department of Art History (later part of its School of Art and Cultural Heritage), Catherine devoted her research energies to a large-scale project, establishing a database compiling exhibitions and collections in the Russian Empire from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Catherine also spearheaded a translation publication project, editing and publishing books on the history of collecting. Under her supervision, in 2022 the European University published Krzysztof Pomian’s 1987 volume Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise. XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (trans. Valery Kislov) and Francis Haskell’s 2000 monograph The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, (trans. Anastasiia Forsilova)—essential works on the history of collecting, both translated into Russian for the first time with introductions by Catherine that explain their significance.

Catherine left Russia permanently in early March 2022 as a matter of conscience following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She had been spending more time in the UK since 2008, when Russia began a regime of visa restrictions, ultimately settling in Norwich. Catherine maintained regular contacts with friends and colleagues in Saint Petersburg, as well as with those who had left. Some of her former students remain in Russia, while others are now studying in graduate programs across Europe and the UK.

Lively, charming, always full of energy, Catherine had numerous friends at the Hermitage. Perpetually overloaded with work, executing several tasks simultaneously, she took joy in life, rode around town on her bicycle, regularly attended the opera, loved skiing, mushrooming, and avidly enjoyed lively dinner parties, always lending the distinctive tone of her English sense of humour. Everyone who knew her grieves her loss deeply. The Hermitage and the European University at Saint Petersburg send their deepest condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Catherine Phillips. She will remain in our memory!

Dr Margaret Samu

Parsons School of Design (New York)