Art gallery exhibition

About exhibition

The picture gallery is located in the former trading hall of the Grain Merchants' Exchange, originally intended for merchant trade. The art collection was formed mainly in the 1920s through acquisitions from nearby estates and from the State Museum funds. The exhibition contains the finest works from the estate picture galleries most fully represented in the museum collection — the Musin-Pushkin, Tishinin, Likhachev and Mikhalkov collections — among them works by notable Russian 18th-century artists such as I. Vishnyakov, F. Rokotov, E. Kamyazhenkov and others. Art of the first half of the 19th century is represented by academic landscapes by F. Matveev, as well as genre and portrait painting by V. Luchaninov, D. Dow, Sh. Mituar and others. A significant part of the collection consists of works by the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants) of the second half of the 19th century — genre paintings by A. Korzukhin, V. Makovsky, A. Popov, reflecting the acute social issues of their time, and realistic landscapes by I. Shishkin, G. Myasoedov, N. Pimonenko, revealing the understated beauty of Russian and Ukrainian nature. The section of Russian art of the late 19th–early 20th centuries is represented by renowned works by Z. Serebryakova, P. Konchalovsky, S. Zhukovsky, I. Brodsky and others. The exhibition is complemented by bronze-cast sculpture by P. Klodt and E. Lansere, examples of decorative and applied arts — furniture made by Russian and foreign masters of the 18th–19th centuries — and a collection of Russian porcelain of the 18th–19th centuries.