Kadriorg Art Museum
Foreign art of the Art Museum of Estonia in Peter the Great's baroque palace at Kadriorg.
Kadriorg Palace was built between 1718 and 1725 for Peter the Great and named after his wife Catherine. The Italian architect Niccolò Michetti drew up the design, with Mikhail Zemtsov supervising the work, and the centrepiece is the two-storey main hall, one of the finest baroque interiors in northern Europe, with stucco decoration by Heinrich von Bergen. The palace stands in a formal garden at the foot of the Lasnamäe escarpment, within the wider Kadriorg park laid out at the same time.
Since 2000 the palace has held the foreign art collection of the Art Museum of Estonia, presenting Western European and Russian paintings, sculpture and applied art from the sixteenth to the twentieth century; Kumu, a short walk away in the same park, shows the Estonian collections. A visible storage gallery on the ground floor displays more than 250 sculptures and is free to enter, and two or three temporary exhibitions are mounted each year alongside the permanent hang.
Highlights
- Baroque main hall with stucco decoration, completed in the 1720s
- Western European and Russian art from the 16th to 20th centuries
- Free visible storage gallery of more than 250 sculptures
- Formal flower garden and the surrounding Kadriorg park
