20 UNSEEN masterpieces from the Tretyakov Gallery (PHOTOS)

Culture
RUSSIA BEYOND
To get into the storerooms of a museum is the dream of any art connoisseur. Some works of art don’t leave the depository for decades, while others never go on display from the moment they enter the walls of the museum. Below are several such examples from the main treasure house of Russian art*.

Dmitry Levitsky, Portrait of F.P. Makerovsky in Fancy Dress, 1789

Fyodor Matveyev, View of Rome: The Colosseum, 1810s

Alexey Venetsianov, Haymaking, mid-1820s 

Karl Baudry, Procession at the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin, 1860

Konstantin Makovsky, False Dmitry’s Agents Kill Boris Godunov’s Son, 1862 

Vasily Perov, Sleeping Children, 1870

Karl Huhn, A Scene from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 1870

Vasily Pukirev, Acceptance of a Dowry with a Check-List, 1873

Grigory Sedov, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Chooses a Bride, 1882 

Emilia Shanks, New Girl at School, 1892 

Andrei Ryabushkin, Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Holding Counsel with the Boyars in His Royal Chamber, 1893

Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Arithmetic: In the Village School of S. Rachinsky, 1895 

Abram Arkhipov, Washerwomen, late 1890s

Natalia Goncharova, Fishing, 1908 

Aristarkh Lentulov, Basil the Blessed, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow: Red Square, 1916

Kazimir Malevich, Sisters, 1930

Piotr Williams, Spring: Portrait of Anna Martinson and Alexei Ponsov, 1947 

Tahir Salahov, The Colosseum at Night, 1979

Mikhail Roginsky, Communal Kitchen, 1992

*The above article is based on material from the exhibition ‘Seeing the Unknown: Painting and Sculpture of the 17th-21st centuries from the Tretyakov Gallery Collections’, which can be seen at the New Tretyakov Gallery from March 28 to August 13, 2023.