Tretyakov Gallery

In June 1898 an important event occurred at the Tretyakov Gallery, already then donated by Pavel Tretyakov to the city of Moscow. Pavel Mikhailovich acquired for the gallery the paintings by Viktor Vasnetsov, "Warrior Knights" (1898) and "Tsar Ivan the Terrible" (1897). At the same time Tretyakov had the pictures on display re-arranged: the exhibition rooms were closed until early November and Vasnetsov received the opportunity to make new amendments to his recent pieces. "In the ‘Warrior Knights’ everything that needed touching up was touched up," the artist wrote to Tretyakov on October 5 1898, "for the better, I believe."[1] Amazingly, this was said after the artist had been working on the painting for 30 years!

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.

Vasily Vereshchagin’s “Solomon’s Wall” (1884-1885) came to Russia for the first time and was exhibited for two weeks in March at the Tretyakov Gallery in the Vereshchagin Room, next to other works by this famous Russian artist.

Founded at the end of the 19 th century by the Moscow merchants and art-collectors Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov, Russia’s largest museum of national art has became a symbol of the country’s consciousness and culture. Pavel Mikhailovich (1832-1898), the elder brother, remains much better-known than his younger sibling, and the Tretyakov Gallery directly owes its existence to him. Pavel Tretyakov made a promise to himself to establish in his native city “a National Gallery, in other words a gallery containing the works of Russian artists”[1] and worked relentlessly toward that goal all his life. He passed on his enthusiasm to his younger brother, Sergei Mikhailovich (1834-1892), who became one of the outstanding collectors of his era, assembling an unique collection of 19th century European paintings. In 1892, Pavel bequeathed to the city of Moscow both his own and his brother’s collections. It was an extraordinary precedent in the history of Russian philanthropy, and the united collection was officially named the “Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov City Gallery of Art”, becoming the nation’s major museum of the era.

28 June 2007 saw the opening of the Mikhail Vrubel room which has been reconstructed to mark the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth and the founding of the Tretyakov Gallery. The new design of the Vrubel room is just as important an event for the museum as the major anniversary exhibitions. The room first appeared in the Tretyakov Gallery as part of the reconstruction of the main building in Lavrushinsky Pereulok which took place from 1986-1995. It was specially designed and built in order to display works by one of Russia’s most outstanding artists at the turn of the 19th century, Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910). Thanks to the generous financial support of Viktor Vekselberg it has been possible to undertake the present reconstruction of the room to celebrate the anniversary of the artist’s birth.