Yaroslavl Art Museum invites you to the Moscow Collectors exhibition

MOSCOW COLLECTORS: Savva Mamontov, Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, Sergey Shchukin, Mikhail Ryabushinsky

Painting, sculpture from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

Museum of Foreign Art. Sovetskaya pl., 2

The exhibition is open from June 28 to October 19, 2025.

In the last third of the 19th century, Moscow became the leading industrial center of Russia. Representatives of the new elite, entrepreneurs and merchants, came from a special environment of the Moscow merchants. Through their compatriots who settled in Europe, the bigwigs of the Moscow business world entered the circles of the Western bourgeoisie and eventually began to show interest in modern art. Accustomed to being guided solely by the internal rules of the merchant class and their own views, the new patrons were not afraid to neglect fashion and boldly made risky acquisitions, which today serve as evidence of their impeccable taste and precision of choice.

The first entrepreneurs were primarily interested in the works of Russian artists. But it was they who laid the tradition of self-selection of exhibits and made their collections accessible to the general public. A striking example of this is Savva Mamontov (1841-1918), the owner of the railways, the founder of the Moscow private Russian Opera and the famous creative colony in the Abramtsevo estate near Moscow. The portrait of the patron, executed by the outstanding Swedish master Anders Zorn, decorated the lobby of Yaroslavsky railway Station, decorated by Abramtsev artists.

The first Moscow collections of Western art were formed in the early 1880s. The interest of their owners in plein-air painting, orientalism, subjects from modern life and the costume genre contributed to the fact that these early collections featured works by masters of various trends and schools, selected primarily according to the criterion of artistic quality.

One of the best collections belonged to Pavel Kharitonenko (1853-1914), a major sugar producer, who collected European paintings in his Moscow mansion, from French Romanticism and the Barbizon school to the works of fashionable salon artists of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The lyrical landscapes of Camille Corot, Jules Dupree and Diaz de la Peña prepared the Moscow public for the perception of modern painting, and fantasy historicism in the spirit of costumed portraits by Franz von Lenbach allowed them to immerse themselves in the poetics of an imaginary world.

In the second half of the 1890s, a new generation of collectors was formed in Moscow. Their interests are rapidly evolving towards modern art, but at the same time, the early acquisitions of such prominent experts in modernist painting as Sergei Shchukin and Mikhail Morozov attest to their deep connection with the traditions of Moscow collecting.

Mikhail Morozov (1870-1903), a representative of Russia's largest clan of merchants and industrialists, a collector and philanthropist, patronized Russian artists, but also acquired paintings by European masters. In his mansion, the works of Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel were juxtaposed with the frightening works of post-Impressionists. But among them were paintings by Corot, which were already beloved by the Russian public, as well as a landscape by the Finnish painter Axeli Gallen-Kallela, whose works made a splash in Paris.

In the 1890s, when Sergei Shchukin (1854-1936) became interested in modern painting, the tastes and priorities of Moscow collectors were already formed. It is not surprising that the collection of the future owner of the brilliant collection of French modernism turned out to include paintings by the "moderate" Maurice Lobre and Eugene Carriere, a painting by Englishman Frank Brangwyn and as many as three works by Norwegian Fritz Taulov.

Mikhail's younger brother Ivan Morozov (1871-1921) started collecting in the early twentieth century. He willingly bought works by artists of various genres: the landscape of the "quiet impressionist" Albert Lebour, the works of the pointillist Paul Signac, expressive paintings by the Fauvists, in particular Jean Puy, and Louis Valt, who was close to Fauvism. Ivan Morozov was one of those rare Russian collectors who collected sculptures by modern European masters in the early twentieth century. In his house, 27 plastic works by foreign authors could be seen. The first acquisitions in the collection were the works of Aristide Maillol. Morozov showed particular interest in the works of sculptors who adopted the technique of textured sculpting by the famous Auguste Rodin, among them Carl and Ruth Milles, Bernhard Hetger. In addition, the collector purchased two works by Camille Claudel, Rodin's assistant and pupil.

Sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Carl and Ruth Milles, as well as Paolo Trubetskoy, were also acquired by Mikhail Ryabushinsky (1880-1960), a representative of the famous Moscow family engaged in trading and banking. When he left Moscow after the 1917 revolution, he hid in a cache some of the works that were discovered several years later.

In the circle of Moscow collectors, the figures of Nikolai Mosolov and Ilya Ostroukhov stand out, who were more associated with the art world than with commerce. Ilya Ostroukhov (1858-1929), who became related to the Tretyakov Gallery through marriage, eventually became Pavel Mikhailovich's successor and from 1899 to 1913 was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Tretyakov Gallery. By that time Ostroukhov, who was actively engaged in painting himself, already owned his own collection of works by Russian and foreign masters. The exhibition features two sculptures by Auguste Rodin from his collection.

Nikolai Mosolov (1846-1914), an etcher and member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, who came from a noble family, was a collector in the third generation – his father and grandfather had their own art collections. Most of Mosolov's collection consisted of graphic works, but there were also objects of oriental art, paintings, and works by European sculptors, including "The Dancer" by Franz von Stueck.

After the revolution, Moscow assemblies had a dramatic fate: They were nationalized and moved from one museum to another as new institutions established in the early years of Soviet rule were opened and closed. As a result of numerous perturbations, the works of European authors ended up in the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, where the history of Moscow collecting is carefully preserved today.

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