Tretyakov Gallery

Pavel Tretyakov was a textile merchant who began buying Russian art in the 1850s with the deliberate intention of building a national collection, bought steadily for forty years, and gave the whole thing to the city of Moscow in 1892. The building in Lavrushinsky lane grew around his house and got its fairy-tale facade from Viktor Vasnetsov in 1904. What is inside is the canonical run of Russian painting: medieval icons including Andrei Rublev's Trinity, portraiture of the eighteenth century, and then the nineteenth-century Wanderers whom Tretyakov largely supported by buying - Repin's Barge Haulers and Ivan the Terrible, Surikov's Boyarynya Morozova, Kramskoy, Levitan's landscapes, Vasnetsov's fairy tales, Ivanov's enormous Appearance of Christ. Twentieth-century work, including the avant-garde, is in the separate New Tretyakov on Krymsky Val, which is a different building and a different ticket.

What you actually see

• Rublev's Trinity - the fifteenth-century icon, the best known in Russian art.
• The Wanderers - Repin, Surikov, Kramskoy and Levitan, bought by Tretyakov as they painted.
• Ivanov's canvas - the Appearance of Christ, occupying a room of its own.
• The Vasnetsov facade - the 1904 front in a deliberately old Russian manner.

When to go

All year; weekday mornings are quietest. Three to four hours. Closed Mondays.

Honest expectations

Weekend and holiday queues are long even with timed tickets. The twentieth century is not here - the avant-garde is in the New Tretyakov, a separate building and ticket across the river. Labelling is largely Russian with some English. Popular rooms get crowded around the famous canvases.

Nearby

The New Tretyakov and Muzeon park are across the river; the Kremlin is a walk north.