Art collecting

In 1856, the young collector Pavel Tretyakov purchased his very first painting - Vasily Khudyakov's “Armed Clash with Finnish Smugglers".

It is believed that Pavel Trelyakov generously lent his paintings to exhibitions, including foreign ones, a belief started by Vasily Stasov, who wrote: "... when told about the new World fair he opened the doors of his wonderful gallery and let them take what they wanted." The reality was far more complex.

"He alone maintained the whole school of Russian painting. An unprecedented and grandiose deed!" In such words the Russian painter Ilya Repin expressed both his own attitude and that of his contemporaries towards the collecting activity of Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov. For more than 100 years the Gallery has proudly, and gratefully, born the name of its founder, who turned the institution into a prominent cultural monument to Russian art that has been appreciated by many generations.

Over the last ten years the Tretyakov Gallery has been displaying drawings from its collections at temporary exhibitions. The exhibition programme has had a continuous focus on the history of the collection of 18th-20th century drawings. The gallery’s 20th exhibition in the series reflects a new stage in the history of its collection - namely, the significant enlargement of the collection in the first decade following the Bolshevik revolution due to new acquisitions from private Moscow collections.

The publication of this article is a tribute to its author, Irina Alexandrovna Kuznetsova, who for more than 50 years curated French and English painting at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The Pushkin Museum, where she took her first job at 17, became for her not just a workplace but a home requiring unremitting care. She was born in 1913, a year after the opening of the Museum, to the construction of which her father Alexander Kuznetsov, a founder of the Russian school of industrial design, contributed. She graduated with a degree in art history from the famous Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (MIFLI) before World War II, and in November 1943 she defended a doctoral thesis on the history of English portraiture. Kuznetsova authored many books and articles, and put together and wrote essays for many albums and catalogues devoted to French and English art of the 17th-19th centuries. Her greatest academic achievement was a catalogue raisonne of French paintings of the 16th-19th centuries from the Pushkin Museum collection, prepared together with Yelena Sharnova and published in 2001. She placed especially great emphasis on the pictures’ origin and their histories as they made their way through European and Russian collections. Her research was summarized in several major articles - most remain in manuscripts only today - about the history of art collecting in Russia from Nikolai Yusupov to Sergei Tretyakov. We are very grateful to the “Tretyakov Gallery” magazine for this publication of Irina Kuznetsova*, who died in September 2002.