Tretyakov Gallery

The State Tretyakov Gallery is the national museum of Russian art, and its historic home in Lavrushinsky Lane, across the river from the Kremlin, is where the story of Russian painting is told from medieval icons to the eve of the revolution. The collection began as the private passion of Pavel Tretyakov, a Moscow textile merchant who bought his first paintings in eighteen fifty six and gave the whole collection to the city in eighteen ninety two. His house grew wing by wing around the pictures, and in the early nineteen hundreds the painter Viktor Vasnetsov gave it the fairy-tale facade in red, white and gold that greets you today.

The rooms follow a roughly chronological route. On the upper floor you pass from eighteenth century portraits through the Romantic painters, the great canvases of Alexander Ivanov, the social realism of the Wanderers, the historical epics of Surikov and Repin, and the landscapes of Shishkin, Savrasov and Levitan. Downstairs are the turn of the century masters, Vrubel and Serov, and then the icons, including works by Andrei Rublev and Dionisius, along with the treasury of jewelled church art. The twentieth century collection is shown in the separate New Tretyakov building on Krymsky Val.

For a first visit allow at least three hours. The famous rooms are on the top floor, but the icon halls at the end of the route are the quietest and the most moving.