Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

The museum opened in 1912 as a teaching collection for Moscow University, which is why its core is plaster casts of classical and Renaissance sculpture at full size - a whole hall of them, still displayed, and now interesting as a survival of a nineteenth-century idea of how art should be taught. Around that grew a real collection: Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern material, Dutch and Flemish painting, Italian work, and the Treasure of Troy excavated by Schliemann, which came here after 1945 and was displayed publicly only from 1996. The Impressionists and post-Impressionists are the other draw and they have their own building next door - Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso, most of it from the Shchukin and Morozov collections built by two Moscow merchants before 1917 and nationalised afterwards, then split between here and the Hermitage.

History

Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, founded the museum in 1912, having persuaded the philanthropist Yuriy Nechaev-Maltsov and the architect Roman Klein that Moscow needed a fine arts museum; despite the name, it has no direct link with the poet Pushkin. It held the Moscow-Paris exhibition in 1981 (Wikipedia, Pushkin Museum).

What you'll find

• The cast hall - full-size plaster copies of classical sculpture from the teaching collection.
• The Schliemann gold - the Treasure of Troy, shown publicly only since 1996.
• The merchant collections - Shchukin and Morozov's Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin and Cezanne.
• The Egyptian rooms - ancient material from the museum's founding decades.

When to go

All year; weekday mornings are quietest. Three hours across both buildings. Closed Mondays.

Things to know

The Impressionist gallery is a separate building and ticket, and it is the busiest part. Parts of the main building have been under long reconstruction with rooms closed. Labelling is mostly Russian. Queues form at weekends and during exhibitions.

Nearby

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is across the road; the Kremlin is a short walk east.

Key facts