State Tretyakov Gallery
Russia's principal collection of national art, from medieval icons to the early twentieth century.
The gallery grew out of the private collection of the Moscow textile merchant Pavel Tretyakov, who bought his first Russian paintings in 1856 and hung them in the family house in Lavrushinsky Lane. As the collection expanded he added purpose-built exhibition rooms, and in 1892 he presented the whole gallery to the city of Moscow. It opened to the public the following year. Between 1900 and 1904 the painter Viktor Vasnetsov designed the well-known facade in a revivalist Old Russian manner.
Today the museum holds more than 190,000 works and the Lavrushinsky complex is devoted to Russian art from the eleventh century to the early twentieth. The displays run from medieval icons and applied art through eighteenth-century portraiture to the Wanderers, with rooms for Ivanov, Repin, Surikov, Levitan and Vrubel. The neighbouring Engineering Building and the building on Kadashevskaya Embankment, opened in 2024, house temporary exhibitions, while twentieth-century art is shown at the New Tretyakov on Krymsky Val.
Highlights
- Viktor Vasnetsov's Old Russian revival facade of 1900-04
- Medieval icon rooms, including works of the Moscow and Novgorod schools
- Nineteenth-century halls devoted to Repin, Surikov, Levitan and Vrubel
- Ivanov's monumental The Appearance of Christ Before the People
