HFUK is a UK registered charity which represents The State Hermitage Museum across the United Kingdom, facilitating cultural exchange and supporting a range of Hermitage activities including exhibitions and loans, acquisitions and a curatorial exchange programme. In addition, the Foundation is responsible for the management of the Hermitage’s international endowment fund, and for a major publishing programme translating the Hermitage collection’s catalogues into English. Alongside these activities, the Foundation runs a busy Friends, Young Friends Patrons organisation that is closely linked to the museum in St Petersburg and which organises regular events in both the UK and Russia.

Projects undertaken by The Hermitage Foundation UK include ‘Hermitage20/21’. Initially launched in 2007, the project's goal is to collect, exhibit and study contemporary art, as well as to build the museum’s contemporary art collection; the programme has since resulted in exhibitions by artists including Anthony Gormley, Zaha Hadid, Henry Moore, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Anselm Kiefer and Tony Cragg.

The Foundation’s publishing programme has produced valuable English translations of many of the museum’s collections including those of Flemish paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British painting, British engraved gems and Persian painting; current volumes in development include French paintings from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and Iranian bronzes of the 14th to the 18th centuries.

Recent projects in the UK include the exhibition of Francesco Melzi’s (1493–1570) recently restored masterpieceFloraat the National Gallery as the centrepiece of theirfocus exhibitionFrancesco Melzi and the Leonardeschi(2019); and ‘The Empress and the Gardener’,an exhibition at Hampton Court Palace in 2016 which showed 70 drawings of the Palace’s gardens by Capability Brown’s draughtsman, John Spyers, recently discovered in the Hermitage Museum having been acquired by Catherine the Great in the 18th century.The Foundation also supported ‘Houghton Revisited. The Walpole Masterpieces From Catherine the Great’s Hermitage’in 2013.