State Russian Museum
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The collection of the Russian Museum numbers some 400,000 works and covers the entire history of Russian fine art from the tenth century to the present day. It reflects virtually every form and genre of art in Russia, including a unique collection of Old Russian icons, works of painting, graphic art and sculpture, decorative and applied art, folk art and numismatics, as well as the world's finest collection of Russian avaunt-garde.
The State Russian Museum is home of the world's largest collection of Russian fine art. The museum is housed in four palaces located in the historical center of Saint Petersburg. Together, these buildings present a retrospective panorama of Russian architecture - Baroque (Stroganov Palace), early and late Neoclassicism (Marble Palace, St. Michael's Palace). From Nevsky Prospect - The central magistral of Saint Petersburg - you can enjoy the image of beautiful building, both monumental and light, with gracious portico of classic Corinthis order. Here, on the Art Square, in the Former Palace of Grand Duke Michail Pavlovich ( "Mikhailovsky Palace") are displaced the main compositions and founds of museum. If you walk from the main building up to the Nevsky Prospect and then turn to the right, you can see the plastic front of the oldest Stroganov Palace, named after its owners, the Stroganov famile.
Then you can have a wonderful trip upon embankment of the Moika river. When you come to the Mars Square, you can see to the left the Marble Palace, built in the late Neoclassicism style. And to the right you can see the romantic silhouette of St. Michael's (Engineers) Castle.
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The State Russian museum in Saint Petersburg is a treasure-house of world importance, where all the wealth and variety of Russian figurative art is superbly represented. However, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that visiting public associate this Museum first and foremost with its famous picture gallery. Indeed, it was the picture gallery that formed the core of the Museum during the period of its foundation in 1895-97 and over the next decade or so. Later on the Museum amassed various collections of sculpture, graphics, and objects of decorative and applied art which were just as important, but for all their richness it is still the picture gallery that enjoys the greatest popularity.
The new collection thus amassed in the Russian Museum toward the close of the nineteenth century ranked with such treasure-houses of Russian painting as the Tretyakov Gallery and the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, and Academy of Art in Saint Petersburg. Each of these older collections had its own distinctive feature, reflecting the aesthetic principles which had underlain the selection of new entries. Similar factors determined the Russian Museum's activities in the first ten years after its inception. The Museum was run under the supervision of the Board of Directors of the Academy of Art and remained totally dependent on the Ministry of the Imperial Court. The Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich was designated as the "most august director" of the Museum, while Albert Benois, professor of the Academy of Arts, and Pavel Briullov, academician, were made curators of the collections (in 1901 Benois was replaced by the genre painter K. Lemokh). The Russian Museum collection almost doubled in size during the first ten years of its existence.
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