Nikolai Gagman

In 2006, the year of its 150th jubilee, the Tretyakov Gallery acquired a significant number of works by the artist Nikolai Meshcherin (1864-1916). Presented as a gift by Nikolai Gagman, art restorer and long-standing member of the Igor Grabar All-Union Centre for Art Research and Restoration, the donation included 17 oil and tempera paintings and six pastels by Meshcherin, as well as archive documents and photographs shedding light on the artist’s life and work. Many years ago, these were purchased from Meshcherin’s widow Lydia Goriacheva-Meshcherina by Gagman’s father Alexander Nikolaevich, a Doctor of Medicine and one of the founders of surgical urology. For many decades, this small treasure remained in the Gagman family. Nikolai Gagman took the best possible care of his father’s collection, doing everything within his means to make Meshcherin better known as an artist. In 1987, Nikolai Gagman organised an exhibition of Meshcherin’s work and published a catalogue to accompany the event, writing the introduction and selecting some fascinating archive material for the catalogue himself. The catalogue included all of Meshcherin’s works from museums and private collections in Russia which Gagman had succeeded in locating.