Museum of Everyday Life and Crafts of the Mining-Plant Population «Gospodsky House»

About museum

The Museum of Everyday Life and Crafts of the mining-plant population is located in one of the most interesting buildings of Nizhny Tagil — the so-called “Gospodsky House”. It is an architectural monument of federal significance from the late Classicism era of the first half of the 19th century. The “Gospodsky House” is a two-story building with a rusticated base and a portico on the upper level consisting of four columns crowned with lavish capitals featuring molded ornamentation and a decorated cornice. The house, together with a stable yard, a carriage shed and a garden, formed an estate that stretched to the floodplain of the Tagil River. It is believed that the construction was carried out to a design by the architect A.P. Chebotaryov. The first owner was Evdokia Deryabina, the widow of a merchant of the 3rd guild. Later the estate was sold to the Administration of the Factories of the Nizhny Tagil District. Distinguished guests from Moscow and St. Petersburg were received here; later the house was used as official housing for the administration and engineers of the Demidov plant. In the Soviet period the interior of the house was gradually altered with additional partitions into communal apartments for the families of workers of the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant named after V.V. Kuybyshev (formerly an ironworking and cast-iron foundry). It was in the Gospodsky House in 1924 that the famous work by Raphael, “Madonna del Popolo,” was found; it is now exhibited at the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts. In the early 1980s the house was transferred to the museum and its restoration began. Restoration and reconstruction work continued for ten years. In August 1997 the Museum of Everyday Life and Crafts of the Mining-Plant Population was opened in this building. Researchers T.N. Petrukhina and E.R. Merkusheva worked on the exhibition; the author of the artistic concept was V.M. Savin, director of the “White Square” association (Yekaterinburg). The museum’s exhibition and its creators — the researchers and artists — were awarded the O.E. Kler Regional Museum Prize in 1998. How did Tagil’s factory craftsmen live? And how did those who managed them live? The interiors of homes of representatives of different social estates, folk clothing, traditional occupations and trades, unique birch-bark items, chests, embroideries and belts — all this is in the famous Gospodsky House.