Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
Moscow's museum of European and ancient art, in a colonnaded 1912 building on Volkhonka.
The museum began as a teaching collection of plaster casts assembled by the classicist Ivan Tsvetaev, professor at Moscow University. Funded largely by the glass manufacturer Yury Nechaev-Maltsov, the building on Volkhonka went up between 1898 and 1912 to designs by Roman Klein, with glazed roofs engineered by Vladimir Shukhov. It opened in 1912 as the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts and took its present name, honouring the poet Alexander Pushkin, in 1937.
The Main Building shows Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern antiquities, the Treasure of Troy excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, and European painting from the Italian, Dutch and Flemish schools, alongside the original cast galleries that recreate Greek, Roman and Renaissance monuments. The separate Gallery of 19th and 20th Century European and American Art at Volkhonka 14 holds the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings gathered by the Moscow collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.
Highlights
- Roman Klein's colonnaded 1912 building with Shukhov's glazed roofs
- Cast galleries recreating Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculpture
- Egyptian collection and Schliemann's Treasure of Troy
- Shchukin and Morozov Impressionist paintings in the nearby Gallery
