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Yaroslavl Art Museum

Yaroslavl Art Museum in Russia includes over 80 thousand exhibits spread across five separate buildings, three of which are located on the Volga Embankment and two in the suburbs of Yaroslavl.

The museum was founded in 1919 on the initiative of local artists and antique collectors. Its ever-expanding exhibits showcase collections of European, Russian and Oriental art. One of the museum’s buildings, which used to serve as the Imperial Travel Palace and the home of Yaroslavl’s governors, has been visited by both Alexander I and Nicholas II.

Russian paintings are a special focus of the museum complex. A rich collection of the works of Repin, Perov, Levitsky, Shishkin, Aivazovsky and other historic local artists are on display in the Metropolitan Chambers Museum of Old Russian Art. The hall was built in the 1680s by Bishop Iona Sysoevich of Rostov, builder of the Rostov Kremlin.

The first art exhibition opened in Yaroslavl in the 1930s. In the 1950s, the museum temporarily vacated the Metropolitan Chambers, only to return in 1977. Eighty-one icons found in the building’s attic at that time are now on display in an exhibition called "Finding".

Foreign art is exhibited in a mansion which once belonged to a merchant named Zinaida Sergeevna Sorokina. In 2010, the building was donated to the museum, and it opened to the public in 2014. Its permanent exhibitions include Western and European art of the 16th- early 20th centuries and Eastern art from the 18th– early 20th centuries.

"Dom na Novinskaya", located in the town of Tutaev in the suburbs of Yaroslavl, was added in 2000. Its two permanent exhibitions, "Provincial Bank" and "Bank Manager's Apartment", portray the lifestyle of the provincial bourgeoisie. In the village of Rybnitsa in Nekrasovsky District is a two-story house with a mezzanine which once was a part of a 19th-century steamer. The house includes an exhibit dedicated to sculptor Alexander Mikhailovich Opekushin, creator of the famous Alexander Pushkin Monument in Moscow.

Today, Yaroslavl Art Museum regularly hosts special exhibitions as well as classical and contemporary music concerts.