The Russian Museum

If the Hermitage shows you what Russia collected from the world, the Russian Museum shows you what Russia made itself. It was the country’s first state museum of Russian art, founded by Nicholas II in 1895 and opened in 1898 in Carlo Rossi’s Mikhailovsky Palace. Today it holds more than 400,000 works across five palaces and two gardens in the centre of the city.

This tour focuses on the main building and the route most people come for. In two hours you move through a thousand years of art and stand in front of paintings many Russians know from their school textbooks, at full size.

The route

Icons. Works from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, including pieces from the circles of Andrei Rublev and Dionisius. The museum holds around five thousand icons in all.

The imperial century. State portraits from the age of Peter and Catherine, and work by Levitsky, Borovikovsky and Kiprensky. Two huge canvases stop everyone: Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii and Fyodor Bruni’s The Brazen Serpent.

The sea. Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave and The Wave.

The Wanderers. Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga and his Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Surikov’s Suvorov Crossing the Alps, and Kuindzhi’s Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, which seems to glow from within.

The Silver Age. Vrubel, Serov, Kustodiev and their contemporaries at the turn of the twentieth century.

Your guide fills in what the labels leave out: whether Aivazovsky painted from life, where Bryullov hid his self-portrait in Pompeii, and how Kuindzhi achieved his moonlight.

Good to know

• The tour lasts about 2 hours inside the Mikhailovsky Palace, at a time and meeting point agreed with you.
• Museum tickets are included; meals are not.
• The tour is private, so you can spend longer in the rooms you like, or focus on icons or the Wanderers.
• It pairs well with the Hermitage, but on a different day.

Who it suits

Art lovers who want to understand Russian painting, visitors who have already seen the Hermitage, and anyone curious about the pictures that shaped how Russians see their own history.