Collections

Among the museum collections of Russian icon painting, the icon collection of the Russian Museum, alongside the Tretyakov Gallery and the Moscow Museum of History, has pride of place. The collection numbers more than five thousand icons from the twelfth to the early twentiet...

The majority of paintings that formed the basis of the Russian Museum collection during its establishment are from the period of the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century.

Among the paintings handed over to the Russian Museum at the time of its foundation, a significant portion was comprised of works by leading artists of the second half of the XIX century. (I.K. Aivazovsky, V.M. Vasnetsov, K.E. Makovsky, I.E. Repin, V.D.Polenov, V.I.Surikov). Despite the fact that th...

The State Russian Museum possesses the largest collection of sculpture of the period from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries in Russia. It began to take shape in 1897-1898 thanks to the re-location of the most famous works of national masters from the Hermitage and the Academy of Arts, and ...

The State Russian Museum holds the largest collection of Russian sculpture of the twentieth century, containing more than 3000 works. Virtually all the major names and specific features of Russian sculpture of the Soviet period are presented. This approach has allowed the preservation of a variety o...

The first numismatic material was collected in the Alexander III Memorial Department during the first years of the museum’s existence. Initially it contained coins minted during the reign of the emperor Alexander III, and also commemorative medals issued during his reign.

The Russian Museum collection of prints contains one of the most comprehensive collections of engravings from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day, in total about 80,000 items. These are separate items, series and albums, maps and playing cards, book illustrations, caricatures, popu...

The origins of the graphic collection of the Russian Museum date back to the time of its opening, 7(19) March 1898. On this day sketches, drawings and watercolors by K.Brullov, F. Bruni, A. Egorov, K. Beggrov and other masters of the first half of the nineteenth century were exhibited in two halls o...

The collection of decorative and applied art of the Russian Museum is one of the most significant in the world, containing more than 35 thousand exhibits. It includes a collection of porcelain, glass, faience, objects of precious and coloured metals, textiles, church vestments, furniture, wood and b...

The Russian Museum collection of folk art is one of the largest in the country. It reflects all the main types of folk decorative art from the prominent local centres of crafts and folk arts and allows to trace their development over the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

The Department of Contemporary Art was created at the end of the 1980s. One of the tasks of the department was to establish the systematised collection of new, non-traditional art forms, new media and technology, installations and assemblages, video art, photography, photo-based art and lots more.

Over the past three decades Russia have had steady interest to the photography as a full and active participant of the artistic process, a subject worthy of collecting, studying, exhibiting and subjecting to aesthetic critique. The Russian Museum has a representative collection based on historical a...

The Russian Museum department of contemporary photography was established in 2010. Its work was aimed at filling the gaps in the photographic legacy of the Soviet period and forming a collection of works by contemporary photographers. From the time of department opening about 1500 works were acquire...