More Russian Art Museums

We visited both the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow and the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, both full of Russian art. Above is the Russian State Museum.

This beautiful giant painting is by Ilya Repin. I love how the crowd of people in front of the painting blends into the crowd of people in the painting.

Below is another painting by Repin. The man was not afraid to paint large. Can you imagine painting something this large? There are 81 people portrayed in that painting. This whole room was dedicated to this painting, which by the way, barely fits in the room! On the surrounding walls are studies Repin did of many of the people in the painting.

Another beautiful painting below by Henryk Siemiradzki, and then a detail below that. It was breathtaking.

I walked around the corner and looked through the doorway to see a beautiful snow scene. It looked almost real and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s by Vasily Surikov. Incidentally those are my two children sitting on the bench. It would be a fun painting to paint the two of them on that bench with that painting in the background. Just an idea to add to all my other ideas. 🙂

Here is a better view of the painting. There is a woman on some kind of sled being pulled through a crowd of people. Surikov loved to paint ordinary Russian people and he painted a lot of historical scenes.

In the photo below you can see a wall of the studies Surikov did for this painting. Now that makes me stop and think. I’m sometimes lazy when it comes to doing studies and certainly wouldn’t even think about doing multiple studies for one painting. No wonder he was such a great painter. There are no short cuts, that’s the lesson I got from this anyway.

Below is a shot of this particular gallery. You can see another large painting by Surikov. That one is of a scene in Red Square.

How wonderful to see these paintings and get a glimpse of the preparatory work that went into them. Seeing paintings of this magnitude, both in size and subject, really opens up a whole new world of possibilities for me. Amazing what some paint on canvas can do!

And, as if all this wasn’t enough, next door to the Tretakov Museum in some kind of annex building, on the third floor, was an exhibit of 100 paintings by Nicolai Fechin! I happened to look up the museum the night before just to check the opening time, etc, and I saw the special exhibit info on the Tretyakov’s homepage. I was so excited I could barely sleep. The last time an exhibit of Fechin’s work was on display was in 1976 and it wasn’t as many paintings as they collected for this exhibit. Unfortunately photos were not allowed but I did buy the book of the exhibit, in Russian of course but I bought it for the photos of paintings. My sweet husband went back with me for a second visit on our last day in Moscow.