Azerbaijan National Museum of Art
Azerbaijan's main art collection, shown in two nineteenth-century mansions beside the Philharmonic Garden.
The museum was created in 1936 when the art holdings of the Azerbaijan State Museum were separated into an institution of their own, and its first exhibition opened the following year. In 1951 it moved into the Palace of De Boure, a late nineteenth-century mansion on Niyazi Street with a rusticated ground floor, pilastered upper storeys and a columned portico. A second house of 1885 next door was added later and now holds the collections of Eastern art. Reconstruction from 2006 was followed by a reopening in 2009.
Holdings run to more than fifteen thousand works, of which about three thousand are shown in some sixty rooms while the remainder are in store. Azerbaijani painting, graphics, sculpture and decorative art form the core, with carpets, metalwork, ceramics and textiles from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Western European rooms include works attributed to Guercino and Frans Hals, and there are Russian paintings by Shishkin and Bryullov as well as Persian and Turkish material. The museum runs concerts, film screenings, lectures and a children's programme.
Highlights
- Palace of De Boure, the museum's nineteenth-century main building
- Around 3,000 works on show in some sixty rooms
- Western European rooms with works given to Guercino and Frans Hals
- Azerbaijani carpets, metalwork and decorative art of the 18th-20th centuries
