Alexander Konstantinov

In May 2006 the Tretyakov Gallery celebrated the 150th anniversary of its foundation. It is no accident that the history of the museum is regarded as having started in 1856 when Pavel Tretyakov first began to buy paintings by Russian artists, and not 1881 when the gallery was opened to the public, or 1892 when the Tretyakov brothers’ collections were given to the city of Moscow. The reality is that, before starting his collection, Pavel Tretyakov had conceived it not as a private collection appealing to his personal taste but as an “artistic museum”, a “... public repository of fine arts accessible to everyone, a source of use for many, a pleasure for all”. That is why Tretyakov himself- and after his death, the gallery’s Board of Trustees - confidently marked 1856 as the beginning of the first Russian national fine arts museum.