Painting [antikvár]

The Tretyakov Galiery in Moscow is one of the world's richest museums, a treas-ure-house of the finest works of Russian and Soviet art. The displays and store-rooms of the Galiery contain over fifty-five thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings representing the entire history of Russian artistic culture, from the eJev-enth century to the present day. The annual number of its visitors exceeds one and a half millión people. This magnificent collection was founded by Pavel Tretyakov (1832—1898), a Moscow collector and a prominent figure in Russian culture. An avid art collector from his early youth, he first began to acquire engravings and lithographs by Western European ar-tists, then small canvases, mostly landscapes by seventeenth century Dutch painters. His interests, however, were soon to take a different course. During his visits to St Peters-burg he became acquainted not. only with the treasures of world art on display at the Hermitage but alsó with the collection of F. Prianishnikov, which contained pictures by Russian painters. Tretyakov was particularly impressed by the genre paintings of Pavel Fedotov: finely executed scenes of úrban life giving a truthful yet humorous por-trayal of the character as well as morals and manners of the Russian people. From that moment he made up his mind to collect works of his contemporaries and in 1856 he bought the first two pictures by Russian artists, Temptation by Nikolai Shilder and Skirmish with Finnish Smugglers by Vasily Khudiakov. This was the beginning of the Tretyakov Gallery's history. In the mid-nineteenth century there were other collectors of Russian painting both in Moscow and St Petersburg but none of them has played such an eminent role in the history of Russian artistic culture as Pavel Tretyakov. His aesthetic views and tastes were förmed at the time when literature, dramatic art and music in Russia were on a powerful upsurge. He was a contemporary and an ardent admirer of Leo Tolstoy and Fiodor Dostoyevsky, he loved the music by the Group of the Five composers, especially Alexander Borodin and Moclest Musorgsky, and he witnessed the success of Alexander Ostrovsky's plays. The advanced ideas of the democratically-minded Russian intelligentsia and their unf'ailing concern for the destiny of the Russian people exerted a tremendous influence on Tretyakov, convincing him, first and foremost, that art was a great driving force in the enlightenment and morál education of the people.