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 Ivan the Terrible and His Son, 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.

History

Pavel Tretyakov began collecting in the mid-1850s, and 1856, when he bought paintings by Nikolay Shilder and Vasily Khudyakov, counts as the gallery's founding year. He gave the collection to the city of Moscow in August 1892, the gallery opened officially on 15 August 1893, and the house his family had bought in 1851 grew by additions until 1902-1904, when the facade from Viktor Vasnetsov's drawings was built (Wikipedia, Tretyakov Gallery).

What you'll find

• 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.

Practical notes

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.

Key facts