The Tretyakov Gallery [antikvár]

Tlie Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, one of the world's largest museums of fine art, enjoys a truly universal popularity in the Soviet Union, and is widely known abroad. Tlie stream of visitors coming to see its treasures has been growing steadily, of late reaching 1,700,000 a year. Added to this are the hundreds of thousands of people in the different republics and regions of the Soviet Union to whom the Gallery's stocks are made available through travelling exhibitions. This popularity is due first of all to the Gallery's unique collection of Russian and multinational Soviet art which today comprises more than fifty-five thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures. The works displayed in the Gallery reflect all the main stages in the development of Russian painting from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries and vividly demonstrate the richness of Soviet art. The collection, which has grown into a national museum of Russian art, was started in 1856, when Pavel Tretyakov (1832—1898), a wealthy Moscow merchant and one of the most cultivated men of his time, acquired his first two paintings: A Skirmish with Finnish Smugglers by Vasily Khudiakov and The Temptation by Nikolai Schilder. Four years later, though he was only twenty-eight at the time, Tretyakov clearly formulated his aims as a collector and his idea of founding a national art gallery for the general public: "I would like to leave behind a national gallery. 1 would like a society of art lovers to come into being, a private one, not organized by the government, above all, one free of red tape without officialdom Being a true and ardent lover of painting, 1 could wish for nothing better than to establish a public repository of works of fine art, open to all, that would benefit many and please everyone." With rare singleness of purpose and tenacity Tretyakov set out to realize this aim, and toward the end of his life his collection included works by Perov, Kramskoi, Repin, Surikov, Makovsky, Levitán, Vereshchagin and other famous Russian painters. Tretyakov was neither the first nor the only collector of Russian art treasures. Apart from the private collections of Shuvalov, Stroganov, Korsakov and some other Russian noblemen of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (in which works by Russian painters were relegated to a secondary role compared with their foreign counterparts), the first collector of Russian paintings was Svinyin, whose picture gallery, called the "Russian Museum", was in existence from 1819 to 1839, when it was put up for auction and sold. From the