Moments from State Tretyakov Gallery

Pavel Tretyakov, a wealthy Moscow textile merchant, spent decades of the nineteenth century buying Russian art specifically, at a time when Russia's own aristocratic collectors were still more interested in acquiring Western European masters, and in 1892 he donated his entire collection to the city of Moscow, forming the core of what remains the definitive collection of Russian art anywhere in the world. The main building, with its distinctive fairy-tale facade added in the 1900s by artist Viktor Vasnetsov, houses work spanning medieval icons, including Andrei Rublev's Trinity, one of the most significant religious icons in Orthodox art history, through to the Wanderers movement Tretyakov championed so directly and on into early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde.

Because the collection is so specifically and deliberately Russian, rather than the broad international survey most major national galleries attempt, it offers a genuinely different kind of art history than a trip through Western Europe's museums, worth going in without assuming you'll recognize many names beyond Rublev, Repin, and Kandinsky. The icon galleries in particular reward slow, quiet looking, these were devotional objects long before they were museum pieces, and the gallery's low lighting and hushed atmosphere in those rooms still reflects that original purpose.