On the 100th anniversary of one of Russia’s major museums, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, RIA Novosti is introducing its readers to the masterpieces of its collection: antique statues, works of the Italian Renaissance and paintings by Impressionists.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts originated from the Museum of Fine Arts and Antiquities at Moscow University, which was founded in the early 1890s by Ivan Tsvetayev. Photo: Fish Stall (1621) by Dutch artist Frans Snyders.
In 1923, the museum was removed from the jurisdiction of the university and lost its status as a teaching museum. Its collection was transferred to the Central Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Portrait of a Young Man in a Gold Wreath, an example of a Fayum portrait, painted on a wooden board using melted wax paints and very thin gold leaf. This is just one of 23 such funerary portraits in the Pushkin Museum collection.
The Ancient World section of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts houses this burial Mask of Agamemnon made of gold and silver, which was found in Mycenae in 1876. The finder of the mask, Heinrich Schleimann, was convinced that he had discovered the tomb of Agamemnon, leader of the Achaean forces in the Trojan War. In actual fact the mask turned out to be from the ancient world.
A dress pin decorated with a rosette, which until 1945 was part of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, is now part of the collection of the museum’s Ancient World section.
A marble head of a goddess from Golenishchev’s collection from the end of the 4th century – beginning of the 3rd century B.C. is one of the most prominent exhibits from the museum’s antique collection.
A crater with an image of Hermes and the infant Dionysus from the Attic red-figure vase painting period.
Portrait of a Young Man as St. Sebastian by Giovanni Boltraffio, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, from the late 1490s, is a masterpiece of the High Renaissance.
Madonna and Child (Madonna in the Vineyard) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, painted around 1520 and formerly part of the Hermitage collection. In modern times the painting was damaged: it had lost its lower and right sections depicting the arbor entwined with grapevines.
The museum also contains the Rubens painting Bacchanalia (ca. 1615), which was created in the period when the famous Flemish artist became interested in the ancient Bacchic topic and created a whole series of works based on it.
The double portrait by Flemish artist Antonis van Dyck shows the famous beauty of her time Lady Catherine Howard on the right and Francis Stuart, the Countess of Portland on the left.
"Allegory of Transience (The Old Flirt)" (1630) by Bernardo Strozzi, which was most likely based on the visual pattern of the famous painting by Genoese master Titian's "Venus with a Mirror."
Painting by the female artist Francois Boucher Hercules and Omphale, an example of Rococo art which originated in France in the 18th century.
"The Magnanimity of Scipio" by Nicolas Poussin (1640), an example of Classicism.
The painting Christ Child (1635-1640) by Seville artist Francisco de Zurbaran came to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts from the Shuvalov Palace, which in pre-revolutionary days housed a splendid collection of paintings, porcelain, bronzes and furniture.
Another prominent master in the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is Rembrandt. At the heart of the painting lies the biblical story of how the wife of Persian King Artaxerxes, the Jewess Esther, during a feast accused the king’s favorite, the courtier Haman, of harboring evil plans to destroy her people.
Canaletto’s painting Return of the Bucintoro to the Mole at the Palace of Doges (1727-1729) depicts the Riva Degli Schiavoni promenade on Ascension Day, the main holiday of the Republic of Venice.
Claude Monet’s painting Breakfast on the Grass has been lost but a small copy of it is housed in the Pushkin Museum.
Red Fish by Henri Matisse was purchased by merchant and art collector Sergei Shchukin who worked very closely with the artist…
…as well as with Gaugin, whose Tahiti collection he almost purchased in its entirety over the course of time. Photo: Are You Jealous? by Paul Gaugin from the Gallery of Art from the Countries of Europe and America of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Pierrot and Harlequin by Paul Cezanne was painted in 1888 and was shown at the Cezanne retrospective exhibition in 1904 in the Salon d'Automne and purchased by Sergei Shchukin.
Blue Dancers by Edgar Degas (one of four works by the artist exhibited in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) was painted in pastel in 1897.
A masterpiece of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, Girl on a Ball. The painting previously formed part of the collection of entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector Ivan Morozov.
Also now part of the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts that previously belonged to Morozov is Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard at Arles.
