Radishchev Art Museum

The Radishchev Art Museum (Russian Радищевский музей ) is an art museum in the Russian city of Saratov. The museum building itself is one of the landmarks of the city and has been projected by the Germans from Russia architects IWStrom.

History

The museum was founded in 1878 by Alexei Petrovich Bogolyubov and named after his grandfather, the Russian writer and philosopher Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev. Back then it was the first major Russian art gallery outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and beyond it was the first art museum in Russia, which opened its doors seven - and fifteen years earlier than the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum. Today it is with its more than 20,000 works as one of the largest museums of Russian art.

Collection

The focus of the collection of paintings form Russian art of the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, there is a permanent exhibition that deals with painting, graphics, sculpture and crafts from the 15th to the 19th century in Russia. The museum has an extensive collection of paintings by Russian and international painters, graphics, sculptures, icons, books and manuscripts. Among them are more than 200 works of Bogolyubov and works by Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Benois, Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan Kramskoi, Vasily Polenov, Nikolai Ge, Karl Briullov, Ivan Shishkin, Konstantin Korovin, Alexei Sawrassow, Ilya Repin, Isaak Levitan, Vasily Surikov, Vladimir Makovsky, Mikhail Vrubel, Ivan Aivazovsky, Martiros Saryan, Boris Kustodiev and Nicholas Roerich and other famous painters.