Natalya Priimak

EXCLUSIVE PUBLICATIONS

Natalya Mamontova, Natalya Priimak
Nikolai Schilder and His “Temptation”

#4 2007 (17)

Admiring masterpieces by the most eminent Russian painters in the Tretyakov Gallery, visitors will not often encounter works by artists “of secondary importance” whose oeuvre was never widely known. Vasily Khudyakov’s “Armed Clash with Finnish Smugglers” and Nikolai Schilder’s “Temptation” prove two fortunate exceptions: for many decades, visitors’ tours of the Tretyakov have begun with this very pair. If Khudyakov, however, is well known to lovers of Russian art, Schilder, whose career as an artist was not altogether successful, would, most likely, have been all too soon forgotten, had his early painting not been purchased by the young Moscow collector Pavel Tretyakov. So who was this Nikolai Schilder, whose name was to become so firmly linked with the history of the Tretyakov Gallery?

150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY

Natalia Priimak
Pavel Tretyakov's Date and Place of Birth

#3 2005 (08)

The family of Russian merchants from whom Pavel Tretyakov was descended had no long-term roots in Moscow. It was only in 1774 that the family moved to Moscow from Maly Yaroslavets, a small town near Kaluga where the Tretyakovs had long been known as merchants. In 1832, the founder of the world famous Tretyakov Gallery and Honorary Citizen of Moscow – a title accorded to very few at the end of the 19th century – was born in the old part of Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye area, in Yakimanka in the parish of St Nicholas’ Church in Golutvino, the first child in the family of Mikhail Tretyakov and the first representative of the fourth generation of the Tretyakov family.

ART COLLECTORS AND PATRONS

N. PRIIMAK
SERGEI TRETYAKOV

№3 2004 (04)

SERGEI TRETYAKOV (1836–1892) WAS LESS FAMOUS AS AN ART COLLECTOR AND PUBLIC FIGURE THAN HIS OLDER BROTHER PAVEL, FOUNDER OF THE RENOWNED TRETYAKOV GALLERY. FAME IS USUALLY DISCRIMINATORY AND IS OFTEN UNJUST, AND THIS IS JUST THE CASE. WHILE PAVEL’S CONTRIBUTION IN MAKING THE TRETYA-KOV BROTHERS’ PROPERTY IN LAVRUSHINSKY LANE A PUBLIC MUSEUM IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED, SERGEI’S PART IN THE DEAL AND THE FACT THAT IN 1892 HE BEQUEATHED HIS ART COLLECTION TO THE CITY OF MOSCOW IS OFTEN OBSCURED. TO GIVE JUSTICE TO MOSCOW, THE CITY FATHERS WISHED TO RECOGNIZE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BOTH BROTHERS; THE WHITE-STONE FRIEZE OF THE FRONT FAВADE, RECONSTRUCTED IN 1902, BEARS A CARVED INSCRIPTION THAT READS: "CITY ART GALLERY OF PAVEL MIKHAILOVICH AND SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH TRETYAKOV".