The Russian Museum was the country’s first state museum of Russian art. It was established by decree of Nicholas II in 1895 and opened to the public in 1898 in the Mikhailovsky Palace, built by Carlo Rossi. Its collection now runs to more than 400,000 items, and the museum complex — five palaces and two gardens in the very centre of St Petersburg — ranks among the largest art museums in the world.
The tour covers the museum’s main building, the Mikhailovsky Palace. This is the route people come to the museum for: in two hours you pass through a thousand years of Russian art, from ancient icons to the Silver Age, and see paintings familiar from school textbooks in the flesh and at their true size.
Early Russian art — icons of the twelfth to seventeenth centuries, including works from the circles of Andrei Rublev and Dionisius. The museum holds around five thousand icons in all.
The eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth — state portraits of the age of Peter and Catherine, Levitsky, Borovikovsky, Kiprensky, and two monumental canvases that cannot be forgotten: Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii and Fyodor Bruni’s The Brazen Serpent.
Aivazovsky — The Ninth Wave and The Wave, the great sea paintings of Russian art.
The Wanderers — Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Vasily Surikov’s Suvorov Crossing the Alps, and Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Moonlit Night on the Dnieper.
The turn of the century — Vrubel, Serov, Kustodiev and other masters of the Silver Age.
Behind every painting here is a story the label on the wall will not tell you. Which four colours Aivazovsky used to paint The Ninth Wave, and whether he worked from life. How the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ letter to the Turkish sultan turned out. Where Karl Bryullov painted himself into his own canvas. How Kuindzhi made his Moonlit Night on the Dnieper appear to glow from within.
The tour is private: your guide works with your party alone and shapes the route around your interests — you can linger in the rooms you like best, go deeper into icon painting, or concentrate on the Wanderers instead. Even if you have been to the Russian Museum before, you will look at familiar paintings differently after this walk.
By arrangement
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 1 | $80 |
| 2 | $40 |
| 3 | $28 |
| 4 | $22 |
| 5 | $18 |
| 6 | $16 |
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 7 | $15 |
| 8 | $14 |
| 9 | $13 |
| 10–11 | $12 |
| 12–14 | $11 |
| 15–16 | $10 |
Jewish St Petersburg: the Grand Choral Synagogue in the Moorish style, the history of the community in the imperial capital, its bankers and philanthropists — and how it lives today.
The essentials of St Petersburg in three hours: Palace and Senate squares, the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island and the place the city began — told through stories rather than dates.
An hour along the rivers and canals with your own guide: the Venice of the North from the water, the bridges and their superstitions, Chizhik-Pyzhik, and the floods that reshaped the city.
On foot through the imperial capital: Palace Square, Nevsky Prospect and Gostiny Dvor, the well-yards behind the grand facades, and doughnuts in a historic cafe — two hours through the heart of St Petersburg.