Russian Art of the Second Half of the XIX Century

Even when it first opened back in 1898, the Russian Museum owned many canvases painted by such masters of the second half of the nineteenth century as Ivan Aivazovsky, Konstantin Makovsky, Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov and Vasily Surikov. Although the selection of works before the revolution was often hampered by the conservative tastes of museum officialdom, the collection nevertheless grew in breadth thanks to the efforts of Alexander Benois, Albert Benois, Igor Grabar and Pyotr Neradovsky.

Placing great stress on acquiring works by contemporary artists, the Russian Museum often purchased paintings directly from exhibitions. Works were acquired from the posthumous shows of the works of Isaac Levitan (1901) and Vasily Vereschagin (1905). Other sources were the Travelling Art Exhibitions (Stanislaw Zukowski, Nikolai Kasatkin, Isaac Levitan and Vladimir Makovsky), New Union of Artists (Boris Kustodiev and Nikolai Fokin) and artist's studios (Alexander Golovin and Mikhail Nesterov).

In 1918, the Russian Museum inherited the collection of Prince Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov, including studies by Mikhail Vrubel and paintings by Konstantin Somov. The Yevgeny Tereschenko collection contained many works by fin-de-siecle artists, among them Mikhail Vrubel's Bogatyr and Six-Winged Seraph. The Alexander Korovin collection included paintings by Valentin Serov, Philipp Malyavin, Mikhail Nesterov, Konstantin Korovin and members of the World of Art, Blue Rose and the Jack of Diamonds.